why i admire jane

on serendipity, rasputin's birthplace, and the coolest 90-year-old in scotland

Meeting Jane was unexpected, as many of the best encounters are. I was visiting Edinburgh solo for the first time, and I was hungry.

A cheap but convenient flight from Dublin matched a cheap but beautiful Airbnb in Portobello, a beachy neighborhood that Jane would later call ‘poor man’s Blackpool’. I’d landed an hour before, and Aldi was my first stop before retiring for the evening. I wanted to cook all my meals during my three-day stay: English breakfasts, haggis sandwiches, and Scottish salmon dinners for less than restaurant price. (When in Scotland, eat like a Scot!)

Ambling down the sidewalk wherever Maps took me, I noticed an elderly woman waving at me as she headed my direction.

“Do you know how to get to the Aldi?” she asked me.

I laughed at the coincidence. “I’m actually headed there right now. You can follow me there,” I offered.

The old woman had fluffy white hair and kind eyes, and she promptly introduced herself as Jane. She wore a puffy jacket, a drawstring backpack locked with a dog leash, and black slip-on Sketchers. She spoke in a lovely Scottish accent, one thankfully light enough for me to understand her over the nearby traffic.

It turned out she needed no groceries, but wanted to see Portobello’s old Roman-Turkish baths. She heard they were across the street from Aldi. I was happy to take a detour to see what I figured were ruins, so I accompanied her in her search.

We made some light conversation, finding the baths rather quickly. They were a renovated feature inside the Portobello Swim Centre.

“They’re in that building, now. The last of their kind in the city,” she noted.

We stood in front of the swim club steps for a quiet minute, watching parents and floatie-clad toddlers come and go. I prepared to say goodbye, thinking she’d go in too.

“Alright. I’ve seen it,” Jane announced, and continued walking.

For the next two hours, Jane and I strolled together in large circles around Portobello. While I had no obligation to stay by her side, I found our conversation progressively intriguing. Born and raised in Dundee, she’d visit Portobello on family vacations. At 27, Jane moved alone to Santa Monica, and shortly after met the love of her life: a man that worked on rocket ships.

“Wow, really? How’d you meet him?”

She beamed. “I worked as a secretary, and my boss came up to me one day and asked if I’d like to go on a blind date with a rocket scientist.”

They married after months of dating and moved into a beachside apartment complex. Swaying palm trees and the lull of crashing waves kept her happily planted in California for decades.

“That’s Harry Lauder’s birthplace, there. Old Vaudeville star,” Jane interjected, making sure to point out local lore between unfurling the stories of her life.

I learned that Jane and her husband traveled everywhere. (I assume the rocket scientist salary helped.) They camped in the Sahara, frequented Europe’s biggest cities, and backpacked through South Asia. Jane found the latter trip was extra memorable, since she accidentally rented them a room for the night in a Pakistani brothel.

“The front desk man thought I was mad. He said, overnight? Are you sure you want to stay overnight? I didn’t understand, and I got short with him, telling him, of course I do, now give me the room!” The walls quickly proved too thin for comfort, and they fled the brothel before nightfall.

Jane told me she came back to Scotland when her husband passed away ten years ago, but had returned many times to California to visit their friends.

“So you still travel often?” I asked. At this point, we’d taken a long loop multiple times, and we were now approaching the grocery store.

“Oh yes, I’m still going, I am.”

Among other solo travels, she’d visited Siberia to see Rasputin’s birthplace.

A local tour guide, one she used Google Translate to communicate with, took her to a small Russian village called Pokrovskoye. She sat alone in the peasant house he was born in, basking in the significance of her surroundings.

I didn’t get to ask why she chose Rasputin’s birthplace to visit specifically, but it was clear nothing could stop her in this goal. Her only option for accommodation was a hostel, being a single room with two sets of bunk beds. Three of these beds were taken by Russian men.

While her tour guide thought this to be inappropriate, she didn’t mind. With how difficult it was to reach, how deep into the country she was, and how bitterly cold it was outside, any accommodation would do.

Jane accepted the bottom bunk, and even became friends with the bedmate above her. He asked her to teach him English, and while she did her best, his enthusiasm outmatched his skill.

“I love you, Jane, I want to marry you, Jane,” he’d say from the top bunk, and she imitated his Russian accent while giggling.

“He was married, of course. Again, he knew very, very little English.”

“How old were you again?” I asked, unable to keep from laughing myself.

“It was five years ago.”

She was 90.

“You did all that at 85?”

Jane’s wild anecdotes didn’t stop. She stood in the narrow foyer of the grocery store for half an hour while she told me how she’d been mugged (twice, once in Morocco and once in Paris) and she even showed me videos of gorillas she’d camped out for weeks to see in the Congo.

She emphasized repeatedly that she wasn’t ‘spinning yarns’, and I told her I wholeheartedly believed her. I asked for her number in my hope to keep our correspondence; to get more of these riveting tales she’d so willingly offered a complete stranger.

Jane opened her backpack and took out a purse, rustling through it until finding a clear wallet sleeve with her number written on it.

“I’ve been almost everywhere, but I still can’t use a cellphone right. It just doesn’t make sense to me.”

She joked that we’d spent too long in the cold, but I told her I would’ve stayed out longer.

I realized that, if it weren’t for solo travel, we would’ve never met. If it weren’t for solo travel, she would’ve had far less advice and fewer stories to share.

Before we finally parted ways, she sang solo travel’s praises one last time.

“I don’t regret any exploring I’ve ever done, especially alone. It’s better on your own, dear. Go everywhere you can, speak to everyone. The whole world opens up to you.”

I haven’t been able to get a hold of her since I left, but I trust that she’s still going.

Until next week,

Constanze