High ho, high ho, it's off to the Highlands we go

Before we ended up finding the Highand games in Airth[or Laurie's description], we had seen a Highland Games in Inverness. Attending a Highland games seemed like an essential while on holiday in Scotland. As Laurie said, it made sense to do a tour of the north (where the Scottish Highands are) at the same time.  We headed up a bit late, but not too bad. We hit some traffic and some rain along the way.  Eventually we got hungry and started looking for something to eat, but places were hard to come by.  We finally found a little pub in a hotel where we got some "take away".

GPS Sidebar

On this trip I'm using Destinator mapping software with an HP iPAQ 4150.  Great software.  It is interesting to contrast it with the (relabeled) software HP provided with the GPS unit.  Both are good but different.  Having a different views is nice. Destinator includes a 3D view, Birdseye, and of course  a convention 2D view.  Like the HP software, the user can decide if "Up" is north or what is ahead of you. When I'm walking around, I generally like having North up but when driving, I generally like to have what's ahead in front of me. Overall the GPS is superb but things to note with Destinator:

Destinator is far superior to Microsoft's Autoroute 2004 which I thought was appallingly bad, but I won't go into all of the details here.

2 miles before a round about, Destinator will alert you that it is coming up.  No problem there, except that while it is 2 miles, and the display says 2 miles, the friendly woman who supplies the audio notification tells you it is 3 miles.  This is so completely consistent it isn't actually a problem, but was kind of funny.

Destinator is different than the two other GPS software packages I have used in the US.  In some ways better, and in some ways not.  Often you can't depend solely on the audio or visual displays independently.  If you looked at both it was clear what you had to do, but if you only looked or listened you might easily miss a turn.  Sometimes the audio would ignore when a road made a 90 degree turn because you had no choice but to take it, I suppose.  Other times, it would include a direction to veer left or right in an inconsistent way.

The GPS software was really chockfull of features.  It took a while for me to appreciate some of the nuances, but after I did I realized that it is well designed for the most part and has good data.  With any GPS system the user interface is separate from the underlying data so when you buy you need to decide which product has the right combination of good data and good interface. It isn't uncommon for many products to share underlying data since there are only so many suppliers of data.  Also, some products include data from more than one source. For example, POI data like hotels and historical monuments might come from one place while road data may come from another.

I was conserving the GPS and iPAQ batteries because we had a long journey and no car adapter.  Eventually we found the games without much trouble. As we pulled in, we saw a "Caravan Site" and I said that it would be funny if that was the place Laurie had found for us to stay. It reminded me of Yosemite. Not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the large caravans and people stacked on top of each other.  Laurie was pretty sure that couldn't be the place she'd called. I don't know if this was wishful thinking on her part, or just because this was so different than the mental picture we had from the description. In any case, there were kids running all over, and auto-traffic on the roads to the park where the highland games were and a nearby indoor "Aquadome" water park.  We weren't thinking much about camping right now though, we had games to see!

The games themselves were very similar to our first Highland games, but much bigger.  The military, police, and fire departments were there to talk to public and recruit. There were even more carnival rides, most of which had a distinctively American look. We've seen at least four carnivals since we got here, and they all had characters of American origin.

The schedule for the day seemed to have been set back by rain so we got to see a lot of sports that should have been finished much earlier. Some, like the Keber and the 16 pound hammer throw weren't new to us, but the Men's Weight Toss for Height was. It was really impressive to see these guys take the ring attached to a heavy weight in one hand and swing it between their legs and up and over 10 feet. Actually, 10 feet was just a warm up. Eventually, the winner did over 14 feet. We were told that the weight was 65 lbs! No women competed in this event, but there were track and field events and bicycle events for them. I'm not sure, but I think a couple of the guys had also competed in our first Highland games.

This Highland Games had more information about various Scottish Clans, music, whiskey tasting, etc. They also had covered bleachers and several really large tents since they get so much rain up there.

Around 17:30 we decided to head out. Since we weren't sure where the camp ground was, we thought we'd go into town where we might get some dinner so we wouldn't have to drive back to eat later and find the tourist information to get better directions since the GPS didn't have a name in the database that matched exactly what Laurie wrote down and we had no actual address.

Parking was challenging downtown. By the time we found parking, the tourist information office was closed. We decided that since it might take a while to figure out where the site was, we should eat before things closed. Also, we were both tired, cranky, and a little hungry so I figured we should relax for a bit before any more frustration ensued. As it turned out, things close relatively late so that wasn't a big concern. Dinner was fine, and we got in just before their big rush. (Have I mentioned that every meal here comes with potatoes?)

After dinner we puzzled further over the map and directions. Looking at the directions, such as they were, the GPS; and the street signage; things just weren't adding up.  Our impression was that the games were 3-4 miles from the trailer park.  I was not looking forward to driving miles out of our way and was getting a bit cranky about the situation. Finally, it dawned on me:

• The street signs indicated that one of the possible towns the campground was alleged to be near pointed toward the park the games were held in.
• Laurie mentioned that the campground was near a water-park.
• There was a similarity of street names near the park and the camp ground.

Now you probably put this together faster than we did, but you have to understand...Laurie had specifically mentioned to the man who took the reservation that we were going to the Highland games that day.  The games are a huge deal in this town.  Posters and signs were all over the place.  There is no way he could not have known about the games or their location, yet he never said to Laurie, "just drive across the street to our driveway."  Rather he gave some very confusing directions.  This was part of why we couldn't imagine that park was where we were planning to stay.

I headed back over to the park if nothing else, to rule out that this was the spot.  Sure enough, the pieces fell into place one after another. Kind of like when you see a car accident, it happens quickly, but feels like it is happening in slow motion.  There was no doubt neither of us wanted to spend the night in this place. Laurie clearly needed a good night's sleep as she was still fighting a bit of a cold like a real trouper and she's a much lighter sleeper than I am, so we had to find somewhere quiet, warmer, and more comfortable.  We had a couple of hotel names from the GPS, but from past experience I was reluctant to reserve without seeing them first.  Laurie agreed, so we drove on towards tomorrow's destination—the Isle of Skye. Worst case, I figured we'd find a real campsite outside of Inverness. 

The GPS was working fine and since we now planed to stay in a B&B or hotel I knew we could charge it so I was less worried about loosing power.  We found several B&Bs along the way.  Some were on the GPS and others weren't.  Interestingly, the GPS lead us to one hotel, but it claimed it was supposed to be about 1 mile before it actually was.  This seemed surprising at first, but as this was countryside and addresses probably coincide more with plots of land than buildings. Also, surveys aren't done frequently so the GPS data wasn't quite right. Fair enough. 

This place had a room, but was upwards of £130 so we decided to "keep motoring"¹ 

The GPS has been wonderful to have. GPS makes driving much less stressful. Between driving on the right side, driving a mini-van, and trying to enjoy the scenery, a lot can be said for having the navigation part taken care of. It also helps promote marital bliss--which of course, priceless^TM.

Another hotel's front door was locked, but their bar was open.  When Laurie asked about a room, they said they had one and gave her a price.  On the way from the bar to the front of the hotel where the owner was going to meet her, Laurie came to ask me what I thought since it was a bit expensive and I suggested we check out the Best Western down the road first.  When Laurie went back to thank the woman and tell her that we were going to be back in a few minutes, she said, "No, now or never."  Laurie came back to the car with a look on her face I don't see very often.  Even though she really wanted to sleep, Laurie told me we weren't going to stay there, so on we went.

We continued on for a while finding several hotels, but all were booked up. We are in "high season".  Finally we came to a place that looked pretty good.  Since I was tired and parking was always a bit of a trial with the minivan, Laurie went to inquire about a room.  She was gone a really long time I think.  Actually, I don't know exactly because I fell asleep, but it seemed about half an hour!  It turned out that the woman in the hotel didn't have a room for us, and felt so badly that she called all over town to find us a spot!  Ultimately, she succeeded and we were off to another hotel.  Now you'd think that by now we'd get some directions or an address...But no.  We were a) too tired to think clearly and b) used to having the GPS take care of us, so we just got in the car and started driving.  Well it turned out the hotel wasn't listed in the GPS and we had no actual address.  So we got a couple of miles or so down the road to the first place we could stop and sorted things out.  It turned out we had to go back  past where we just came from to get to the town where the hotel was.  Okay, off we went.  We got to the town in about 15 minutes but couldn't find the hotel so we asked at a gas station.  The attendant was very nice, but his directions weren't all that helpful.  He kept saying to take the main road but it wasn't clear to us which that actually would be.  After asking him to clarify several times, we figured it must be obvious once you get going so off we went.  After driving almost out of town, I knew we must have been on the wrong track and I headed back.  We finally found the place and it looked alright.  The only problem was that we had to park in back, in a sort of ally/parking lot and I was nervous.  For a small town this place had a lot of drunk people coming out of bars. It was after midnight by now, so I could easily imagine some young drunk guys trashing the car.  We checked in and found our way up to the 2^nd (or 3^rd for Americans) floor of the hotel.

We made our way up some stairs which turned out to be fire-escape only so the doors were locked on the outside. Back down the stairs carrying the bulky suitcase holding our combined stuff, we found a side entrance to the hotel. Clearly they are doing some renovation and tools, nails, the odd piece of wood littered the hallway. The first stairway we found was not much wider than our suitcase, so it was a challenge getting up the stairs. I thought it was unusual for a hotel to have such narrow stairs, but I didn't know we had chosen a secondary route. There was a wider, more formal entrance further round the corner.

The room was small and simple, but would certainly due.  We were both really beat.  I wanted to read, but the only light to choose from would have kept Laurie up so I just went to bed which was probably for the best. I am anxious to finish Bill Clinton's My Life which I'm now about half-way through.

I charged up the iPAQ and GPS so we'd be all set for tomorrow.

Ah well, more tomorrow.

¹ Favorite expression of Carson from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.