When I travel, I can’t resist a quirky hat shop. While exploring Candlemaker’s Row in Edinburgh, I ended up in a hat shop called Rosie’s. My best friend, Kim and I, tried on hat after hat, taking on their personalities, from jaunty riding hats to French Riviera sun hats to Irish tweed newsboy caps. We decided new hats qualified as necessary purchases and we used Kim’s emergency credit card. (We paid it back later.) Kim was smart in her purchase, buying a Great Gatsby style hat knitted from soft cream chenille, perfect for traveling because it folded up smaller than a sock. I, on the other hand, did not choose wisely. I bought a large stately blue structured hat, like Audrey Hepburn’s hat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s hat. It was impossible to pack, and since I was backpacking without my own personal bellhops, I had to wear it. My new hat fell low over my eyes, so I couldn’t really see where I was going. We swaggered into a coffee shop in our new hats. A cute boy (at least I think he was cute, I couldn’t really see him) looked at Kim and said in a thick Scottish accent, “Ay, I see you’ve got a tea cozy on your head.” Then he turned to me, “And what have we here? A lamp shade?” We all burst out laughing and ended up making plans for him to give us a ride to Inverness the next day, although he said my hat would have to be tied to the top of the car since it wouldn’t fit.
Kim and I went back to our hostel and put on our velvet capes for dinner. (Did I mention we had already used our emergency card to buy “necessary” velvet capes in London?) While we stood on the corner of a cobblestone street discussing dinner options, several different sets of tourists walked up to us and asked if we were running ghost tours. We were tempted to answer yes, thinking we could make back the money we had spent on hats.
We actually really wanted to go on the official ghost tours ourselves, but we were out of money. We hatched the brilliant plan of walking backwards towards the tour groups, hoping they wouldn’t notice the two caped girls in hats lurking near that tree. They noticed, of course, and yelled at us that we weren’t allowed to listen, at which point we ran down the steep hill barely lit by flickering lanterns, our capes billowing behind us like 18th century heroines racing into the dark night, but who needs a light when you can be a light by wearing a lampshade on your head?
