the Bierman's Travels

A Cup of Joe and Post Office Package Woes

2004-07-30T19:25:00.000+01:00

Being that we are soon going to leave Scotland, we thought it would be nice to thank Phoebe, our most generous and entertaining neighbor, for being such a delightful addition to our stay on Regent Park Square. We decided to go to a nearby bakery and get some goodies to take back to Phoebe and her daughter, Molly. We knew Dominic, the man of the house, was on a business trip to the States, so we wanted to be sure Phoebe was not lonely (not that Phoebe is one to get lonely easily) and that she knew how much we enjoyed spending time with her.

We found Bradford's Bakery right down the street from us and picked up some croissants, chicken pie, raisin puff pastry and a fruit tart to take back. We had another lovely visit with Phoebe and her house guest from Brasil, whose name I have forgotten. Apparently this gal is a family friend who has been in London studying English and staying with Phoebe's sister while she's been there. She took the time to come and keep Phoebe company while her husband has been away and to help take care of the kids, which I thought was very nice of her to do. We shared with Phoebe all our happenings in the Highlands and she continued to share her stories about her endless aggravations that go along with trying to sell her home. Unfortunately, the potential buyers evidentially pulled out of the deal last minute and claimed that Phoebe and her husband were not being attentive to requests that they had made. It sounded pretty pathetic to me! In any case, she had people coming to take a look at the house so we had to skaddadle and let her tend to getting the house cleaned up and ready to show!

A big errand that we had to take care of was to go to the nearby post office to ship a box a stuff home that we didn't really want to shlep to London and Nice. Thanks to Phoebe, our first challenge of finding a perfect sized box to put the stuff into, was easily taken care of. She has a collection of boxes in her shed that she was happy to have us take a look at. Luckily, we found one that would suit us well!

We decided we would ship home a bunch of books we had bought while we've been here, some sweaters, some glasses and my long, heavy winter raincoat (which I have only used 3 times since I have been here) to at least lighten our load a bit. We looked at our filled box and thought, "Ah, this might cost a bit to ship but, hey, how bad could it be??"

Speaking of shlepping, we took the box (or I should say Michael carried the box on his back)to Victoria Road, where many little restaurants, pharmacies, grocers and the post offices are located. Before we could take the box to the post offices, we had to make a stop off at the hardware store two doors down to get twine and/or packing tape to make the box secure. Michael found some heavy duty tape and we packaged everything up safe and secure at the post office before getting in the long line that was out the door. We waited patiently and continued looking at the box trying to estimate how much this thing weighs and how much we would have to pay. We get up to the counter, weigh the box, find out it weighs about 9.5kg (roughly 20 pounds)which puts us at £55 to ship this thing to America -- and this is the cheap way! Michael and I look at each other, we ask if there is a cheaper way. We pull out of queue, use the clerk's scissors to tear open the box, and start unpacking. We struggle for a bit, trying to decide what is essential to ship and what can we try and cram into our already full suitcases and backpacks. After rearranging the contents a bit and looking at the items carefully, we decide it's worth the £55 to ship this stuff and not have to deal carrying it around any longer. So... we put everything back, pack up the box with the remaining tape we had, and got back into the long line once again! We approach the same clerk who helped us the first time and told us that the form we had filled out with that had our address on it will be placed on the box but that we might want to write our address on the actual box just in case the form should detach. After several unsuccessful attempts at trying to write our address on the huge amount of tape that we wrapped the box in, the lady gives us a piece of paper and tells us to get out of line while we create a shipping label and adhere it to the box. Out of the line we go again, fighting with the pen once again and strategically trying to tape the paper securely on the box. We finally manage to make it work to only discover that there is an outside chance that the box might not get to us in the states and that they now need an address where the box can be returned should there be a problem. We first thought Archie's address would be the sensible one to give but then figured that if it did come back to him, he would have to then take care of the package and repay shipping fees. Not a nice thing to do so someone who has allowed us to stay a month in his house! We chose to classify the box as "abandoned" should get lost or is not, for some reason, able to get to California. I will cross my fingers... it would be unfortunate if I don't get my coat back and I have a few things I have purchased that I would like to give as gifts! We'll see what happens in the next 4-6 weeks!

After the fiasco at the postoffice, we went back to the house and spent the rest of the afternoon blogging and sorting out how we are going to get to the airport on Sunday to travel to London. Long story but... looks like we will be getting up around 4:00AM to catch a 4:45AM bus downtown that will take us to Prestwick airport, which is the airport on the outskirts of Glasgow. Our flight to London doesn't take off until 8:15AM so this ought to be fun! Oh well...that's what we get for taking a discount airline carrier and booking a flight earlier than the trains take off on a Sunday morning!

So... with this, I sign off. I most likely will not, unless I feel that something noteworthy happens, add anything to the blog tomorrow and will resume once we begin our adventures in London. We have things to take care of, an errand or two to run and an early bedtime ahead of us tomorrow so... probably nothing too exciting for the day ahead.

Ta-Ta for now!. London, watch out! Here we come!

Miscellaneous Musings

2004-07-29T23:59:00.000+01:00

We spent the day blogging mostly. Here are a series of things that I have been meaning to write about but that don't fit under any particular adventure.

Scottish/British Dialect

Today's term is DIY- (pronounced simply D I Y): A term used commonly for "Do-it-Yourself".

Television

Big Brother is an absolute national obsession here. It isn't new, this is like the fourth season. Each season is 10 weeks long (74 days exactly). We will have seen about half the season by the time we go back home. Next week is the last week. The premise of Big Brother is simple. In all, there were 13 characters live in a completely secluded compound on a studio lot and the whole nation watches everythign they do, and I mean everything! The only contact they have with the outside world is through "Big Brother" who is an omniscient voice (sometimes male and sometimes female) that tells them what to do and sometimes talks to them in the Diary room. Throughout the 10 weeks "characters" are evicted until a winner is chosen. As in the Highlander, there can be only one.

Not all 13 were in the house at the Big Brother house at the same time. Some came in late in the game to replace other characters that were "evicted". Each week someone is "evicted" and goes on to a life of minor celebrity. Every paper and tabloid has something about Big Brother in it. Normally two or three are nominated by the people in the house and then the entire nation votes on who goes. Voting is a money making scheme that costs 25p to vote by calling on your mobile or text messaging. Text-messaging is used to vote on lots of things here, always with a small fee (20p). This is not surprising since the whole thing is sponsored by TalkTalk, a telecommunications company that offers both land and wireless service as well as broadband. In addition to the voting scheme, of course there are ad revenues and Big Brother gets a huge viewership, from the web site itself, and broadband service. Now neither Laurie or I have ever been into Reality shows, but we have become a bit hooked on Big Brother. I should explain that Big Brother is not a one trick pony. Not only is there the prime time Big Brother which is basically the day's highlights , but there is a "Big Brother Live" which shows them getting ready for bed, sleeping, and if you are lucky, something more exciting like someone taking a shower. This is usually about as interesting as watching a piece of lint float through the air. There is also a talk show hosted by a young MTV-like VJ who discusses the latest happenings, politics, and events of all that is Big Brother. Next is a panel of psychologists, nutritionists, and other experts who talk about the effect that things may be having on the Big Brother residents. And lastly, there is a special every Friday after someone is evicted where they come back out into the real world after weeks of isolation from the world.

Once a week Big Brother gives the "characters" a task. Sometimes they are individual tasks and sometimes they are team based tasks. Some are physical challenges and others are more intellectual. Some designed to test the patience of the "characters" by making them do things that are particularly frustrating for them, or make them work with people we know they don't like. Frequently, the "characters" talk to us through Big Brother to confide their strategy, blow off steam, complain, sing, dance, or anything else they like. No one can enter the room or interrupt them when they are in the Diary room talking to Big Brother.

Sometimes one person leaves in a week and sometimes several are chosen. The whole thing is like a psychology experiment gone slightly wrong where most of the rules are changed in what must feel like an arbitrary manor designed to test the "characters".

Big Brother is such a phenomenon that large amounts of money are bet on the outcome. The odds of a given character being evicted or winning are discussed daily. The current favorite is Nadia.

"Nadia is the eldest of six children. She was born in Portugal but moved to England eight years ago. She has previously worked on a perfume counter in a department store and managed a children's bookshop. Nadia has had a sex change."

Part of the fun is that the other characters don't know about Nadia's sex change. Frankly, I am surprised that Nadia is in the lead. First, I think she's a bit obnoxious personally, but moreover, I can't picture a transgender character being so popular in the US. In that sense, I am happily surprised that people here are so accepting.

Big brother is full of language and images that puritanical Americans couldn't tolerate including full nudity at times.

Big Brother isn't the only reality show. The British public love their reality shows. Another is Car Booty where people sell off their attic clutter at Swap meets. Almost exactly the same is Cash in the Attic. I found both fun to watch. Completely different, except that it also appeals to people who appreciate antiques is Restoration Nation. Here's the official description.

Across the UK, thousands of historic buildings are in danger of being lost to the nation forever. This summer BBC TWO features a call to action in the fight to save our heritage. With comedian and active conservationist Griff Rhys Jones at the helm, viewers will be asked to vote for and help save one of our 21 most endangered buildings.

Each programme will focus on three endangered properties in one area, then offer viewers the chance to vote for the building they would most like to see restored. Each of the regional winners will go forward to the Live Final, a spectacular celebration of the nation's heritage, and the moment when one property is voted as the most worthy of Restoration.

Every historic building has a wealth of tales to tell, and, with the help of two experts, conservation architect Ptolemy Dean, and historic buildings surveyor Marianne Suhr, the series will bring the buildings back to life and depict them in their prime.

I think this is a great show and a fabulous way to learn about history as well as preserve important sites.

There are several DIY shows like a garden make over show and one where a couple are taken house shopping with some experts. There is also a show where a family tries moving to another country and setting up a new life.

Another great show is SuperNanny where an experienced Nanny helps families work things out with children who have behavior challenges. Of course, often these are due just as much to how the parents have trained the children, as with the children themselves. The Nanny is no Mary Poppins. She's fairly tough but very effective.

I've already written about wife swap which is sometimes interesting. The other day we saw a show were the women who switched were opposite extremes of physical fitness. And, of course the occasional American show is on there such as Sex and the City and Nip/Tuck.
Note that in the UK you have to have a "TV license" which costs about £10 per month! That is required for any device that can receive TV including a computer with a tuner card. Note, this is in addition to any cable service you may wish to have. Licenses can be purchased at the Post Office, but more on the Post Office later.

Nuttin' Much...

2004-07-29T19:16:00.000+01:00

Not much to report for today. We still had to catch up on laundry and we continued plugging along with the blog. After being away from our laptops for several days, we both had a lot to add to the blog and the pictures and doing so takes a huge amount of time -- often more time than we expected.

We hope you have continued to enjoy reading about our travel adventures, for this, it is well worth the time it takes to keep things updated. I also know that as time goes on and our travels are well in the past, that we will appreciate the time it took to include every detail, every silly story and every picture as the blog will help keep all the memories that will hopefully last a very long time!

A Second Time Around

2004-07-28T17:09:00.000+01:00

Today was the day we were actually going to get the chance to see the castle that we had been wanting to see for several weeks. We woke up and had our leisurely breakfast at our B&B -- the usual cereal, scrambled eggs and toast with tea or coffee and o.j. It was nice to not have to feel rushed to get on the road in order to get to Inverary Castle on time. We were so close that we were actually able to take our time and enjoy waking up to a new day!

We headed out at about 10:00, dropped our luggage off at the car and decided since it was such a lovely morning that we would walk to the castle. After all, we were about a 5 minute walk, so why drive?? It was a nice walk and we arrived just shortly after the castle opened. Surprisingly enough, by the time we got there, there was already several tour buses that had arrived shortly before we did.

We wandered through Inverary Castle, trying to dodge the large tour groups of Italians and Germans, and enjoyed seeing all the beautifully designed rooms and memorabilia of the Argyll royal family and the Clan Campbell. I really liked the way in which the first several rooms had items that dated back to the 1700s and towards the end of the tour there were a couple of rooms that had various items and pictures which showed the development of the Clan Campbell from the past to present day.

My favorite room of the castle, primarily because if it's design and airy feeling, was the Great Armoury Hall. The huge displays of swords, firearms and axes hung in creative rounded patterns made the room more massive than it already was. I had never seen items such as the ones in this room look so impressive and attractive in a "pretty" sort of way. The more I looked, the more I admired the way in which the arms were arranged against the bold yellow walls. It made the weapons look more like pieces of art than what they really were.
The time we spent in the castle I felt was well worth the wait and all the trouble we took to actually see what was inside. Our persistence surely paid off!

After roaming through the castle, we took some time to walk around the grounds of the adjacent Argyll Estates. Upon entering the grounds, we saw a color-coded sign that led us to believe that there were hiking paths of different lengths available for exploring, depending on how long of a walk one wanted to take. We saw the colored markers and followed them only to keep running into dead ends and paths blocked off by locked gates. We were a bit confused but how hard it was to actually find a path that went anywhere. After trying several times to follow paths that eventually took us to blocked off sections, we decided to walk around the open fields where the sheep seemed to be enjoying their feast of grass. We watched for awhile while they continued tending to more important matters rather than paying any real attention to us. It was rather funny watching some of the sheep eat the grass so quickly (and I thought I was a fast eater... geesh!)and seeing some of the others taking breaks and basking in the sun.

We decided to head on out and walk back to the car since it looked like a hike was not in the cards for us or at least not around the Argyll Estates. It felt good to know we had only about an hour and half drive back to Glasgow since we had been driving quite a bit the past several days. We considered stopping once again in Stirling on the way back to Glasgow but decided we really wanted to get back, unwind, catch up on the laundry we DESPERATELY needed to do, and update the travel blog before anymore time got away from us and we had forgotten all the important details of our adventures to the Highlands.

It sure felt good to return to homebase. The time away from Glasgow was not a long time however, looking back and realizing that we had actually been away from the city for 5 days without a washing machine and at times without a decent shower, it was fair to say that we were ready to return to civilization and home conveniences.

Along with being back "home" we decided we were tired of eating out and wanted a home-cooked meal. We drove to the local neighborhood SUPER Safeway and picked up some things to whip up a quick dinner. There was something comfortable able being back in the Lacey's quirky home and cooking in their disorganized kitchen. As much as I enjoyed being away from it all and seeing such a different part of Scotland these past days, it was good to be back in Glasgow. As odd as the Lacey house may be, I have grown to appreciate it for what it is and have adjusted to having it be our "home away from home"!!! It is hard to believe we will be leaving the house the day after tomorrow and living in hotels for the next two weeks... The Lacey house will be missed!

Inverary Castle, At last!

2004-07-28T01:44:00.000+01:00

I enjoyed the little room we stayed in, very much. We got up to another nice breakfast and got on our way before 10. Not bad for us. We walked over to the Castle and I was keen to see if the cows were around to say hello. I was quite taken with them on our first visit. The parking lot was pretty full when we got there and the cows were seeking refuge from the tourists by staying far back in their field. Since they were uninterested in welcoming us, we headed into the Castle, which was just opening when we arrived. After only three attempts, we were going to see the castle!

From the outside the castle looks like something out of a fairy tale. It had no real fortifications like moat, or places to put cannon for real use although for aesthetic value, there are a couple of French cannon in front of the castle. There was no explanation of how French cannon got to the Castle, unfortunately.

Inside was a different story though. There isn't a "Great Hall" as in Sterling or Edinburgh, but in the Central Hall Inverary Castle has one of the biggest collections we saw of antique weaponry including swords, guns, bayonets, halbrads, etc. It was all beautifully presented. The room is stunning! The weapons are in excellent condition, and the ceiling is over 68 feet tall!

The Campbells go back a long time in Scottish history and are an active, proud group to this day. Part of the history is the legendary feud with the MacGregor family (and their leader, Rob Roy) which lead to the very banning of the MacGregor name. The MacGregors became Jacobites (supporters of the Stuart dynasty of Kings James. His defense of Stuart line made Rob Roy either an English traitor or Scottish patriot, depending on your historical view. Ironically, Robert MacGregor's mother was a Campbell and at one time, the Duke of Argyll (head of the Campbell clan) gave him permission to use some of his land for his cattle business.

Again, not a lot of our own pictures because they were prohibited, but we got another souvenir book there too.

We walked around the gardens for a while afterwards and saw some of the cows again, but they stayed at a fair distance.

The ride home was uneventful because the GPS did a perfect job of navigating for us. We unpacked the minivan, started laundry, and got to work on the blog.

It is a long, long way to Inverary...

2004-07-27T23:32:00.000+01:00

It rained a good part of the night and there was no sign that the clouds were going away. I had hopped we'd get at least a short hike in that morning, but the woman we'd met the night before said that she had to take off her hiking boots they sank so far into the muck yesterday. Now, the ground had several more inches of water. We'd be really dirty and have to spend a lot of time cleaning up before we could get into the Lacey's minivan so we had to give up. I definitely want to come back and do some hiking and/or climbing here sometime. It is a wonderful spot.

We repacked the car and set out to retrace our steps back much of the same roads that we'd been on. Not surprising since there aren't that many roads on the island. The only problem was that the GPS batteries were dead. I had left on the GPS the night before. Ugh, boy did I feel pretty stupid. I gave it a quick charge in the bathroom while I washed up, but I knew that wouldn't last long so I only turned it on for brief periods when we needed to know where we were, and then used the iPAQ to get the next direction.

We got off Skye without too much incident. The only other stop we made was at a shop we saw on the way in to get some whiskey glasses for my friend Jeff back home. After we got off the island, I turned the GPS back on. For some reason, it was confused and kept wanting us to go back to Skye! Since it hadn't lead us wrong yet I thought it might know something I didn't. Since we were under some time pressure, I didn't want to drive out of the way. First I drove down the road a bit but it kept asking me to make a U turn. I finally gave in and did a U turn at a gas station. Soon as I did, it told me to do another U turn. As we thought, we needed to go away from Skye, not toward it!

It is about a three and a half hour drive from Skye to Inverary. I tried to keep the GPS off as much as possible since I knew there were a couple of roads that might be confusing. Unfortunately, I couldn't conserve enough and soon we were without the aid of technology. After a couple of hours we got hungry and looked for a place to eat. It took a while, because once again, bars and taverns--much less restaurants were a rare commodity. Frantically we found a place which was okay but not speedy. A side observation--not only do you not get coke refills here, but tea is a one serving beverage as well. I really don't get that, but it is just about the only complaint I have so far so I guess that's okay.

After lunch we continued the drive to Inverary Castle which we tried to visit once before, but got there too late. Laurie was doing her best to help navigate with the various free maps we had picked up along the way but she can't read for very long while passengering because it makes her sick. She was very good at remembering the names of some of the places we'd been to the first time we tried to go to Inverary Castle and used that to guide us most of the way there. Unfortunately, we got lost though and ended up about 40 minutes on the wrong side of things! What to do? Time was running short. We could give up and go home or we could press on and give it a try. I got the impression that Laurie wanted to see the inside of the castle and I did too. We weren't sure if the castle closed at 17:00 or 17:30. We also didn't know if they stopped letting people in 45 minutes prior to closing as many castles do. Without the GPS, it took me a few minutes to get oriented and determine how to get where we wanted to go. That wasn't easy as I'd lost track of where we actually were at this point. First thing you need to know is where you are before you can worry about where you want to be. That critical bit is one thing the GPS is really good for, but because of my mistake we didn't have it handy. We sorted things out though and on we went.

With a few quick stops along the way to verify that we were going the right way, we made it to the castle! Yeah!

Ineverary, finally

Another GPS sidebar
It turns out it is a lot easier to read the GPS while driving than a map. The GPS has large letters, speaks to you, and has giant arrows to point you in the right direction. It also eliminates useless information. Paper maps just don't do all of that, but they don't run out of batteries, either. Pros and cons I guess.
Ironically, there is a persistent license in the Destinator software that makes you agree not to use the GPS while driving, but I've never seen a map with such a requirement. Needless to say the fact you have to click on that extra button when you start the Destinator software makes it more hazardous than if they didn't bother to warn you. Go figure!

Unfortunately, the castle was closed by the time we got there. By this point I was really tired of driving. Though it was rainy by the mountains on Skye, it was humid near Inverary. We hadn't showered and we'd been driving franticly to reach the castle. To my surprise, Laurie was up for camping nearby and trying the castle tomorrow. I'm usually more anxious to camp than she is, but we were already wearing dirty clothes because we hadn't bought enough, we hadn't showered, I was tired, and a little hungry. We decided to see if we could find a reasonable B&B for the night and we got lucky. Right across from the main road there was a nice place with a bit of a view of the Loch. We dropped off our stuff and walked around for a while and then grabbed dinner at a very cute little place. I had another steak pie if I recall, and Apple pie for dessert!

Inverary is a cute little town, but one of the mour touristy places we visited. This is probably a virtue of it being closer to Glasgow and Edinburgh, having a decent castle, and a beautiful Loch. There are many shops that happily cater to the many tourists that come to Castle. As an aside, one of the things I've noticed is that unlike many other places I visit, you don't see the same items for sale at every tourist spot in Scotland. There really are regional differences, and the shops generally cater specifically to the area or attraction, not generic "Scotland" junk. The only exception was a few books on Scotland and Scottish history which appeared at several locations.

I think we got lucky on the lodging because a lot of tourists come up for the day on a bus and go back in the evening. While it is only 90 minutes from Glasgow, I was glad we had a more leisurely time of it--even though we had planned to be "home" in Glasgow that night. I took a rally nice, long, hot shower and settled in for the night after I read 30-40 pages more of Clinton's My Life.

Inverary Mishap

2004-07-27T19:52:00.000+01:00

What? It's already 9:30AM??? How can that be? We wanted to get up early enough to take a short hike up the hill overlooking the campsite and at the same time get an early enough start to head to Inverary to see the castle we really wanted to see.

Well, since it was later than we wanted it to be, the fog was still rather thick and it was drizzling outdoors we made the decision to get ourselves cleaned up, pack up the van and head towards the mainland in order to get to Inverary Castle before it closed. We really wanted to see this castle and knew that this would be the last opportunity we would have to get there. While getting our things packed up and ready to go, I met a swarm of the infamous Scottish Highland midges! We had been told about these little buggers and really had no idea what they were or when, if ever, we would get a chance to meet face to face. While heading to the bathroom to wash my face and brush the teeth, a huge swarm of them decided to hang out around my head, face, ears and arms and start biting. They must have enjoyed their feast because later I discovered several tiny bites on the back of my hand, arms and a few on my face. These little flying, biting gnat like critters are well known in areas of the highlands where there is an abundance of water. They are cousins of the mosquito and are just as annoying! If we were going to stay any longer than we were, I probably would have insisted on finding somewhere to buy repellent but since this was the only time I had to deal with the midges and we were on our way out, didn't seem necessary!

We headed back the way we came in order to recross the Skye Bridge and pay the toll once again. We did make a quick stop at the Skye Jewelry Shop again so that Michael could buy some crystal whiskey shot glasses for one of his buddies. We basically did retrace our step back off the island but since we were intending to stop off in Inverary, our route was going to be slightly different from the one we followed to get on the island. So, we drove, and we drove and we drove and drove and drove some more. We seemed to have a pretty good idea of where we were going and what roads we needed to take to get to the city of Inverary. Keep in mind, we were on a timed schedule and we needed to be sure we got to the castle in plenty of time to take a tour however, we also needed to stop and eat something since we hadn't had any breakfast before leaving Skye. We thought we were in good enough shape to be able to take some time to sit down in a restaurant and grab lunch so we did just that and found a pub off the side of the road. Wouldn't say the service was quick but it was at least a decent place to get food! So back on the road we go, again, feeling like we knew where we were going.

Since we have been in Scotland, the majority of the time we have gone anywhere, we had depended greatly on Michael's GPS to help direct us to our various destinations. We weren't using it this time around since the batteries seemed to be dying down and we had maps that we could follow to get to Inverary. We continued on and came to signs that pointed to Oban and Inverness. I was quick to be convinced that Oban was the way we wanted to head since Inverness was where we had been up north and we were headed more south. On the map I was looking at it looked to me that Oban was not far from Inverary so I kept telling Michael to follow the signs to Oban and then once we got to Oban we would be finding a juncture that would then take us down to Inverary.

OOOOPS,I guess big error on my part. We eventually arrive right in the center of Oban, not even close to Inverary. The map I continued to look at was not a very good map since it had very little detail and didn't show all the little connecting cities that more detailed maps showed. We get to Oban only to find out that we have just driven an hour out of our way and have only about 45 minutes or so to get to the castle before it closes, at least I was thinking it closed at 5:00PM. I felt horrible and sensed that Michael was not pleased to have driven an hour out of the way and quite likely missing the opportunity to see the castle we were so anxious to see. I was rather disappointed myself and after looking at a more detailed map, discovered where I had made my mistake and where we should have turned to get to the correct highway that would have led us right into Inverary instead of Oban.

We frantically drive to the castle and notice that the sign says the castle closes at 5:45 but the last entry is at 5:00... it was 5:30 by the time we got there... we were screwed!! Now I felt really bad and felt I had to think of something logical to do to hopefully make things a little better. We were both very tired of driving and just needed to take a break. That is when I suddenly came up with the idea of finding either a campsite nearby or hopefully and inexpensive B&B in Inverary so that tomorrow morning, right when the castle opened we could still take the time to see it. We were now in the city we needed to be and even if we needed to spend another night "on the road" and possibly spend more money for a place to stay, it sounded like the right thing to do. I was all up for camping another night but since we had not taken a shower and were feeling pretty dirty, our first choice would be to find a B&B to stay in. I had noticed several B and Bs as we entered the city however many of them were listed as having no vacancies. We had gone down that path before and I wasn't about to go driving around trying to find another place to stay. We took a break in a little park across the street from the tourist information office to try to come up with a plan when I noticed a little sign hanging on the side of the building that was right next door to the tourist office. It was a sign that said that one of the flats inside the building was a B&B and thought I should at least check it out. It would be the perfect location to stay since the B and B was within walking distance to the castle. I was afraid since it was located on the main road near many of the tourist attractions, that the B and B would either be booked and/or be rather expensive but I wouldn't know until I at least went to see check out the situation. I left Michael waiting in the park and went to explore the situation.

Opening the door to the building, I noticed that the inside looked a little run down. Signs were pointing me to flat #5 where the B&B was located. I went up several flights of stairs to get to this flat and wasn't quite sure where the B and B might be hiding since I had always stayed in houses or hotels that were B and B properties --never in a flat! I knocked on the door and a friendly little lady answered the door. I asked her if she was in charge of the B and B and if so, did she have anything available. She told me the only room she had was a double room and invited me to take a look at it. Someone was definitely on our side... it was a cute little room in her flat with wood floors, a nice double bed, a huge skylight in the ceiling and a beautifully tiled bathroom attached. Looked like a great place to stay for the night and I just assumed, since it was rather nice that this lady would be charging quite a pretty pound for the room. I asked her how much and she told me 35 pounds! I wasn't sure I heard her correctly and asked her if that was 35 pounds per person per night since that was the standard way the other B and Bs we stayed in advertised their rates. She giggled a little and told me that it was just 35 pounds for the room and breakfast-- nothing more, nothing less. "We'll take it!" I quickly yelled, very happy to have found a comfortable place to stay for the night. I felt better that I at least did what I could to help remedy the situation and was hoping Michael would find the room as charming as I did. If nothing else, at least we had a place to stay at a great rate AND we would be right near the castle so in the morning, it would be just a hop, skip and a jump to get there. We would be so close that we could even get there before any of the crowds came!

Before heading in for the night, we walked around Inverary a bit and did some window shopping down the streets near our B and B. We found a little cafe where we were able to unwind and have a relaxing dinner.

Back to the B and B for a warm shower, some TV and a good night's rest and pleasant dreams!

Skye, Day 2

2004-07-26T23:54:00.000+01:00

Woke up and had breakfast cooked by Sam. He made us scrambled eggs on toast with toast on the side. One thing about the Scots, there is no shortage of bread and potatoes (or "chips", aka French fries) at almost every meal. Juice, coffee, tea and a choice of Mueslix or cornflakes were also available. The food wasn't spectacular but it was pretty good and it was a HUGE improvement over what we experienced at The National Hotel.

Over breakfast, Sam, pulled out his various maps to show us all the various routes we should take while we were out exploring more of the island. He recommended some of his favorite places and made sure we had plenty to see over the course of the day.

Sam was kind enough to let us use his computer to try and book tickets for a play at the Globe while we are in London next week. Along with using his computer, the question of how we ended up at the other Kilmuir House came up. Sam was very interested in hearing how I came across the other Kilmuir House's website and also wanted to know what I though of his and how it might improve. Both Michael and I tried our best to let him know, in a delicate sort of way, that if he is really serious about attracting people to his B&B, he needed to make his website easy to read and accessable. He has quite a way to go as far as getting more information on his site for potential visitors. As he and his house are, his website is also VERY simple!

We bid our farewells to Sam and headed just a mile or so down from his place to Dunvegan Castle. Although certainly not my favorite, Dunvegan is certainly an interesting castle to explore and visit. It is rather beautiful inside and has some lovely wooded gardens surrounding the castle property. Dunvegan Castle has been occupied by the head hanchos of the MacLeod Clan since 1270. There is a lot of neat memorabilia to look at in the castle and is worth a visit if you are ever on the Isle of Skye.
We wandered around the gardens after going through the castle. Very pretty grounds with several different types of gardens. The Water Garden was my favorite. It had luscious green foliage and a tiny waterfall flowing down the rocks of the garden. It was rather nice walking and seeing all the different types of plants, flowers and trees located in the different gardens.

From the Castle, we decided to drive around and see what there was to see in the town of Glendale. On the way there, we made a stop at a little woolen shop that had all types of sweaters and scarves for sale. There were some beautiful items there and I ended up getting a couple of sweaters. The lady who worked there was very helpful and was interested in whether or not we were enjoying "our holiday". We continued talking to her about her life on Skye and she explained how expensive things cost on the island. Groceries are expensive since many of the items have to be driven over the bridge from the mainland. She also told us about winters on the island and how horrible the rains and wind can get. She was enjoyable to talk to and gave us just a little more insight as to how life is lived on Skye. It is cetainly a very SIMPLE and different kind of life!

We continued to drive and just had to make a stop in Colbost where the world famous "Three Chimneys Restaurant" is found. We had been told by the across the street neighbor, Phoebe, that we must try this restaurant while on Skye. Apparently this establishment has quite a reputation and is very well known for its outstanding food and service. We tried getting a table the night before for dinner but they were booked so we decided since we were on the way to Glendale we would make a stop and try to get in for lunch, as Sam had told us getting in for lunch is much easier. By the time we got there, lunch was no longer being served. We inquired about dinner and of course, as expected, not a chance getting a table. It seems as though one needs to make reservations way well in advance to get a table for dinner. We glanced at both the lunch and dinner menus outside the restaurant and although it may be very good, there wasn't anything on either menu that caught either of our eyes as being a MUST HAVE experience. We didn't feel we were really missing much.

In Glendale, we stopped off at Skye Silver, another jewelry shop that specializes in all types of sterling silver necklaces, bracelets, rings and other items. They make their own pieces and seem to be a fairly popular place to buy items from Skye. Nice stuff but I didn't end up buying anything.

We wanted to see if we could get to the one and only whiskey distillery on Skye before it closed, so we drove a little and found it only to find out that the last tour just left shortly before we got there. Oh well! Now what? It was time to see if we could find a gas station, some dinner and a campsite for the night. Since I was feeling MUCH better, and we had planned on camping somewhere on Skye anyway, we wanted to find a place that was somewhat remote and that had a great view of both water and hills.

We took a look at a campsite in Sligachan, which would have been okay but it was near the highway and looked sort of busy. It did have spectacular views of the Cullin Mountains and it had a hotel and restaurant right across the highway... it certainly would have been the more convenient campsite to stay but convenience wasn't necessarily what we were after. Fewer people around, fewer cars and views of water as well as the hills were what we were hoping for.

We had to get to the "large" town of Portree to get gas and looked for a place to eat. Nothing striked our fancy so we returned to Sligachan and ate dinner in the bar adjacent to the hotel that was across the campsite. We were trying to decide whether to just stay where we were or head on down a little south to a campground called "Glenbrittle" which looked very remote and appeared on the map to be potentially a better spot to camp than Sligachan.

We drove down south and found Glenbrittle. Yes, definitely, this was by far a MUCH better place to camp. Drove through the gate that was at the base at the campsite and immediately were impressed with what we saw. Great green hills all around, ocean on the other side of the site. The fog was rolling in by the time we got to the campsite and was resting on top of the hills. There were quite a few people who were camping but never did it seem as though anyone was on top of another person and everyone was very respectful of eachother's space and privacy. Noise was not a factor either. It was certainly one of the more quieter campsites I have been to.

We parked the van, and decided to take a walk along the beach before it got too dark. It was an unusual beach in that it had black sand and rocks all over. There were tons and tons of seaweed all over the sand and at the base of the water. There was so much that we were able to walk on it to get pretty far out toward the ocean. We saw various shells and even a couple of jellyfish washed up close to shore. We ran into a young lady from Bristol, England who knew this campsite well and had been coming to this spot every year with her family since she was a little girl. She informed us that this visit was the first one in 10 years and it is by far the best camping site, in her opinion, in all of Scotland. She was very impressed that we even took the time during our holiday to get to know Skye and to go out of the way to find the spot that evidentially has a very special place in her heart! One amazing thing that this gal shared with us that neither Michael nor I could comprehend was how far the ocean travels to and from the shoreline every 12 hours. While we walked, we were able to see just how far the current had gone down and it was clear that much of the land was still wet from when the water had last risen. We just couldn't believe it had gone down as much as it had and from what the lady told us, this rise and fall happens quite naturally every 12 hours or so. It was hard to even believe but apparently had to be true from the lasting results we were seeing.

The temperature was getting colder, and we were losing light rather quickly. We got washed up and decided to set up camp in the back of the van and read our books as much as we were able to do before we could no longer read. We left the back of the van open and could hear the sound of the ocean behind us as we were reading our books. This place was definitely not a place anyone would come across if they were on a short trip to Scotland. We felt very fortunate to have had the amount of time we had in order to really get to know Scotland and to be able to come across such gems such as Glenbrittle. Before we knew it, we had lost our light for reading and decided to call it a night on the earlier side so as to be able to wake up early in order to possibly take a hike up the ridge of the hills overlooking the ocean. We also wanted get an reasonable start to Inverary so that we can do whatever possible to get to the great castle we had missed the last time we drove there. Since we were up in the northern part of Scotland and Inverary Castle is north of Glasgow, it seemed only reasonable to take advantage of where we were and drive down to Inverary on our way back to Glasgow.

Another day, another Skye

2004-07-26T15:28:00.000+01:00

Our Kilmur house was simple and cozy. We got up, had a nice shower, and Sam made us a nice breakfast. He then spent at least 30-45 minutes telling us about things we could do while on the island. He asked what our plans were, and I hated to tell him we were going to spend another night at the island--but not with them, as we'd planned to camp out since we'd missed our first opportunity in Inverness. He was very gracious and gave us some great suggestions.

The first thing we did was see Dunvegan Castle. We don't have a lot of pictures as they prohibit photography in the castle. We did get a nice souvenir book to remember our visit. Just a couple of observations.

Dunvegan castle is the centre of the clan MacLeod. Skye and Dunvegan has more norse influence because it was an opportune spot for the Vikings to invade.
I know nothing about preservation, but there is remarkably little done in many sights we visited to preserve the artifacts they house. At Dunvegan Castle, windows were open, without screens and with no UV protection. I have to say that Dunvegan was one of the only sights that seemed to have a very visible security system including motion detectors.
Like many of the sites we visited, there was no live or audio tour available. They did provide laminated sheets to provide some history, which was very nice.

Dunvegan wasn't my favorite castle, but the gardens were very nice. It was interesting to see the range of fortifications of castles. Dunvegan was the home of a chieftain, not a king so there were never as many armaments built around it as say, Sterling or Edinburgh.

Onward from Dunvegan...

We took some time to cover the north west of the island. There wasn't a lot to see, but it was a nice drive. More sheep, grass, and slightly flatter than the south west or south east. We stopped by a few shops and by the famous Three Chimneys Restaurant. This place has quite the reputation in the UK. Apparently some people have even been known to helicopter in for a weekend visit and dinner at the restaurant! We weren't able to get in on this visit--it is very small and books up well in advance. Perhaps next visit.

We headed to the South west of the island to locate a camp site. There was a campsite and a convenient cross roads at Sligachan. It had a nice view of the Cullin mountains but it was a bit close to the road. I had my eye further down south to the Glenbrittle area. It also had a view of the mountains, but also the Sea. We made our way down the long, one lane rode with "passing areas" for about 25 minute drive through even more nice country side. The island is filled with these small roads so driving is even more challenging than the goats, minivan, and right-side would be otherwise. The only downside was it was very grey, soppy as we drove down. It was rather majestic though to see the clouds hanging so low on the 3,166' mountain range. When we got to the end of the road (literally) there was a gate to a camp site, right where the GPS said it would be. Excellent! We parked and went for a walk on the beach. There was something very desolate and solitary about the place even though there were a reasonable number of people in the campground. People were quiet and unusually respectful. How could you not be? The beach was about 600 yards deep; that is, the water travels between the high and low tide marks. I'd never seen a beach like this. The sand was highly compacted and so was easy to walk on. it was a graphite colour and filled with all kinds of life since we were now at a low-tide point. Unfortunately, there was a sheep laying in the sand that was no longer full of life. Something had happened to the poor guy and he passed on. I could think of worse places to spend your last minutes, but it was sad, but peaceful.

As we walked along the beach, we met a young woman from Bristol. Until ten years ago, she had been coming to that spot with her parents every year since she was a little girl. She knowingly pointed out the landmarks like the island of Canna--one of the several in Inner Hebrides the way someone would show you around a house they had lived in all their lives. Some of the other islands--Rum Island, Mull, Eigg weren't visible from our standpoint. She told us about some of the good hikes and climbing that were to be had just up the path at the other end of the campsite, just past the bathrooms. She also shared the important news that there was a family of otters at the end of the shoreline earlier that day. Now that's important! Perspective. We had a pleasant conversation where she shared her passion for this place with us. Somehow, I was moved by what it meant to her. Later, I found myself wishing I knew why she'd been away from it for ten years, but I didn't get a chance to ask her.

In addition to the fog, we'd lost most the day light, so after a walk on the beach, we went back to the van and read for a while before calling it a night. Reading in the back of the van, with the back hatch open and the sea just beyond was very peaceful for a while. But soon I began to notice what I determined must be the famous Scottish Midges!

There are something like three dozen types of midges--all related to mosquitoes. The female midges byte, but do not sting. They are apparently more annoying than anything, but they have gotten under one too many kilts and the Scots have been working hard to deal with them. There is now a machine used to combat these pests that produces a scent the midges rather like--which is basically an artificial cow manure smell made of methane and some other things--to attract the midges. Once attracted, they are sucked into a giant vacuum cleaner. The machines are expensive for now, so they are used in beer gardens and other public places.

I hopped that the skies would clear the next day because we were right at the base of some beautiful mountains that were met by the Sea of Hebrides. Even with the bad weather, I was intrigued by the place. I knew what our neighbor in Glasgow, Phoebe meant when she said that people either love or hate the place--it feels desolate to some. On a clear day it must be absolutely amazing and I wanted to find out.

The road to Skye

2004-07-25T17:23:00.000+01:00

I got up because we wanted to take advantage of the included breakfast and get a good start on the day. There was just a bath in the room, no shower. I really needed something to wake up a bit so I took a quick bath while Laurie caught a few more Z's. It looked like she really needed them. When I got out, we got dressed and I took the bags down to the minivan. We were both still really groggy and morning isn't my best time in any event so the comedy of errors that came next wasn't funny until lunch time. While I went down to the car through the main stairway, Laurie followed shortly after down the back stairs where we had come up the night before. I went to the lobby after dropping the bag and didn't see her so I went back to the room only to find her gone. Someone stole my wife! I checked the lobby and restaurant and didn't see her at first. This was a true farce...She slowly walked up from the side of the hotel where she had walked around the outside of the building...the only place I hadn't looked. Ah well...

We decided we should grab breakfast so we didn't have to stop later. Now I thought breakfast ended at 9 so the fact that it was deserted and the food was "bottom of the barrel didn't surprise me. There were some eggs, really nasty looking meats, cold cereal, some juice, and something I couldn't identify. There was some staff around, but they paid us no mind. They were too busy cleaning up after breakfast to see to us. Laurie seemed to need tea, so I chased the waitress down and asked her for some, which she brought fairly promptly. I had to find cups, some silverware, and napkins from various other tables— as there were no clean, completely set tables. I tried something that was apparently an oat cake which was sort of like layered uncooked oatmeal. It was as bland and dry as it sounds. I ended up eating enough, but it wasn't a memorable meal. The one exception was the waitress who continued to clear tables as we ate. She generally seemed to act as if no customers were in the room. She seemed to be exceptionally board or tired and cleared things in a strange order as if to kill time until the end of her shift. She also tossed one of the two tablecloths on each table on the ground in the middle of the room which sort of put me off.

Just as we were ready to leave, the waitress asked another table if they'd like toast. Apparently it was supposed to come with breakfast, but she'd never bothered to ask us if we wanted any. It also turned out that breakfast wasn't officially over until about 9:30, so there wasn't a good excuse for her inattention. Although the room was adequate, we were glad to be leaving.

Now we had a fully charged iPAQ and GPS so navigation wasn't going to be a problem. We headed out for Skye. The drive takes about 90 minutes or so. The weather was much nicer today and we stopped several times along the way to take pictures.

Along much of the way the road shadows an active rail track. It is possible to take a train almost all the way to Skye. The trip would have been really fantastic, I'm sure, but we would have had to rent a car when we got to Skye to get around anywhere.

I'd heard that the Highlands are amazing, and they are. There is open space that seems to go on forever, with a hundred shades of green, and mountains and streams that are stunning. The drive alone would have made the trip worthwhile. Now many of the residents of this paradise are fairly small manufacturing companies that are called sheep here. Much of the wool for tweed clothing and cashmere comes from the Highlands.

Every once in a while we decided to stop to stretch our legs. We came across a sign for a stained glass studio. That sounded pretty interesting so we turned off to take a look. As we drove, we saw a sign for "stained glass and bees-wax paintings". Now I was really interested because I'd never heard of that. As we pulled up, I figured the small building would house a small, but respectable sized gallery. There was a small leanto in front which seemed to be the entrance. As it turns out, that leanto was the studio. We had a look and while we weren't excited by the stained glass work, the bees-wax paintings were sort of interesting so we picked up a couple. The artist was a very chatty bloke who told us about his neighbors musical endeavors, and a bit about his life. Like many people we've met, he doesn't travel far from home. He told us that on Sundays he often just leaves an "Honestly" box and goes drinking. Even though there's been upwards of a £130 in the box, he's never had anyone steal from him. It was refreshing to hear about such honestly. It reminded me of the stands we ran into on the Hawaiian islands where people sell flowers, fruit, and nuts through the same honestly policy. I'm not sure if the natural beauty is the cause of such honesty but paradise in these places is far deeper than just the natural beauty.

Back on the road, we saw some lovely horses and captured some more pastoral scenes. Soon enough we were at the controversial Skye bridge. What could possibly be so controversial about a bridge? Well from what we gather from the discussions, there are several issues. The bridge is privately run and the toll for an auto is £5.80 each way, £2.90 for a bicycle, and trucks are a great deal more. The majority of ferry service were discontinued after the bridge was completed, making it the only way for residents to get on and off the island. You can walk across for free, but it isn't illuminated at night so locals complain it can be dangerous if they bike or walk across. There were also some environmental concerns about the bridge and the extra traffic the bridge brings to Skye.

Soon after we got over the bridge, we saw some sheep on the shore of the Loch. Not often you see unshorn sheep at the sea shore! We had to check it out. Soon, the Cullin mountains and the Old Man of Storr came into view. With mountains and water come waterfalls. Skye had many of them. It also has a lot of wildflowers.

We continued on around the north of Skye toward where we thought our B&B was. (Do you sense a story coming on? Good.) I had fun collecting wool that the sheep had shed around when we stopped for pictures. I figure if I find enough, Susan will make me a sweater when we get home. Man, I can't wait! We also got to see some really funny sights like a cow with a great sense of self-esteem.

Did I mention the sheep? There are a lot of sheep on the Isle of Skye. They are fearless. Unfaised by speeding cars or steep cliffs where they enjoy their meals. Just over the cliff from these guys, we saw a really nice cove where there were unusual rock formations that extended from the beach out into the water. " Now the sheep are really cute, but the local paper included the following warning:

Let's be clear on this one--they are not to be regarded as cuddly, friendly, woolly jumpers with a magnetic attraction for car bumpers. Treat them as devious, plotting, assassins hired by some crooked breakdown merchant to force cars off the road. In short, they are a menace.

We had no problems, but I kept my eye on those little guys! We stopped at a place named, the Aros Experience which is kind of a combination of local entertainment and community center (including movie theatre), shopping for tourists and locals, and restaurant. Now this is not a giant mall, it was a fairly small place, well laid out, packed full of interesting things. Lunch was a real surprise. I had a delicious lamb stew, the likes of which I have never had. It may have looked like a "cafeteria" but the food was superb.

Now back to that story I alluded to earlier.

I had entered the information Laurie gave me for the Kilmur house,where we'd booked a room, into our GPS. Now if you check these links carefully, you may notice that they do not refer to the same house. Oops. yes, we went to the wrong Kilmur house! We followed the GPS' directions drove up around the northern tip of the island which is quite stunning. When we reached the Kilmur house we knocked on the door and and told them we thought we had booked a room. Pretty quickly they realized we'd probably got the wrong one and called over for us to confirm. We weren't the first ones to have made this mistake. They were very nice people. Actually, since we wanted to see the north end of the island, nothing was really lost. But it did mean we didn't get to our Kilmur house until about 18:30. While it wasn't quite as fancy, the people were very nice here as well. They suggested we try a restaurant called, The Old School Restaurant just down the street. it was a very cozy place that still felt very much like it's namesake. We headed back to our place and spent an hour or so with our host family talking about everything from Shakespeare to Big Brother. The father of the family is a retired Finance guy who used to work in London near the Globe theater (more on that when we go to London.) When he got laid off a few years ago, he packed up the family and moved them to Skye. What a life! They were really great people and I enjoyed the conversation very much, but it was time to get some sleep. We have a big day ahead of us tomorrow!

Over the Bridge to Skye

2004-07-25T12:59:00.000+01:00

A new day... a new morning... a new start. I wake up after having about 3 hours of sleep and feeling rather thankful that we will soon be leaving Dingwall to head to the tranquil surroundings of Skye. We are due to stay in a B&B over on the island so at least we know where we are staying and it seems that the chances of getting a good night's sleep has now increased.

We get our clothes on and head downstairs to what the National Hotel calls breakfast. The price of the room includes breakfast so we thought we should get at least get a little something in our stomachs before heading on the road again. We go into the dining room and see a buffet style breakfast. Could be good, that is, until we take a look at what they were offering. There were these horrible looking greasy fried eggs sitting under a heat lamp, the scrambled eggs looked rather mushy and were sitting in lots of liquid and to top it off, the bacon and ham looked dried and full of grease! There was no way I was about to eat any of the cooked items so I grabbed a very small bowl of cornflakes and some juice and hoped that would at least give me some energy to start the day. We find a table. No silverware, no salt, and we continue to look for some milk to put on our cereal. Things are not properly set on the tables and no one offered to bring us toast or coffee/tea that we saw so many of the other guests enjoying. We had to hunt someone down for tea and didn't bother to ask for the toast... it didn't seem worth the trouble. I was anxious to check-out and get the heck out of this place!

We get back to the room, pack up our things,and I tell Michael I will meet him downstairs after checking out of the hotel. He grabs the suitcase and backpack and leaves me with the stack of coats we brought and our books. I drape the coats over my shoulder, tuck the books under my arm, take the key and am about to race downstairs to check-out when I realize I have absolutely no idea how to get downstairs. I circle and circle around our floor trying to find the stairs that lead to the main lobby but continue to retrace my steps or run into walls. I feel like I am Alice in Wonderland trying to get out of the maze of mirrors... this hotel is freaky! I get sooooo pissed off I slam open the only door I do find that leads back to the outside fire escape and proceed to stumble down the stair, coats in all, half asleep, swearing under by breath, but... trying to keep the humor, yah, right! When you climb down the fire escape steps, they lead you to the back of the hotel so when I climbed down I had to drag the coats to the front of the hotel in order to reenter the hotel to check out. I get there unable to find Michael at first.. it seems as if we are passing eachother. While I am downstairs he went up to find me in the room, only to find out I am not there. I expect to find him downstairs. We do this ring around the rosy thing for several minutes... I, try to keep the humor, which has now flown out the door and has sunk deep into the depths of the earth. I will find it again, eventually but we first must head out of Dingwall!
Okay, all is well, we have checked out of Hotel HELL and are now ready to start fresh...Skye, here we come! The drive to Skye is oh so beautiful. We see lochs, forests of Scottish pines, sheep and cows along the road and majestic, awesome green hills and mountains surrounding us. The views only get more and more spectacular the farther north we drive. As we continued to drive, we stopped several times to take in the view, take pictures and stretch our legs. We were in no hurry to get to Skye so we took the time to really absorb the scenery. At one of the stopping points, we met at lovely Welsh family who was headed to Ft. William for several days. We asked them to take our picture for us and we returned the favor. We chatted with them for several minutes, they told us what we should see if we should ever visit Wales and also informed us about the Scottish pines we kept seeing everywhere. We enjoyed our short chat with them!

Time to continue on... we arrive in LochCannon and see signs along the road for a stained glass studio. Both Michael and I enjoy looking at various types of glass art and thought it might be worth a stop to see what this studio had. As we got closer, we not only saw the signs for the stained glass studio but it also said something about beeswax painting. Not knowing what beeswax painting were, we just HAD to stop now... curiosity got the best of us. We turn where the sign tells us to go and all we see is this small house with what looks like a small greenhouse like entrance attached. This didn't really look like a studio but we figured the greenhouse entrance was the entrance to the studio which was probably in the house. We proceed towards the entrance and realize that the entrance IS THE STUDIO. We are greeted by this older gentleman who welcomes us to his art studio which has a few cheap looking stained glass hangings, embroidered dolls, and of course, the beeswax paintings. The artist, was quite a character. We enjoyed talking with him and hearing about his life, his neighbors, who play in a local band, and his Sunday drinking day. He had no problem telling us that on Sundays, his drinking day, he would leave the studio wide open, put a sign up and place his "honesty box" out for people to leave their money in if they happened to stop by and purchase things. He would be off at the local pub, drinking the day away and not caring much as to what might be happening in his "studio". He has never had any problems with the honesty box and claims it seems to work for him. He was happy about that so as it allowed him to be away and "get to better things" than to have to hang around in case someone MIGHT come by. We weren't all that impressed with his glass work but we did end up buying 3 of his beeswax paintings, which were quite unusual and beautiful at the same time. Not something you come across everyday and they were reasonably priced so we grabbed one for our home and a couple to be used as gifts.

We continue our journey to Skye. We finally get to the one and only bridge that connects the mainland to Skye and are prepared to pay the controversial toll fee of 5 pounds 60pence EACH WAY. This bridge was built in 1995 and has since created much controversy and outrage, creating opportunities for to protest about the high cost of the toll. To this day people are campaigning to get the fees either reduced or eliminated.

We pay the fee (at least we were well prepared) and enter the roads of beautiful Skye. The day is a sunny one and the way the light falls on the hills and the water makes everything look so magical. As we make our way towards the town of Uig, where we believe is where the B&B is, we stop to take a look a small waterfalls and take many pictures of the surroundings, not to mention the numerous sheep that dot the hills and sit right along the roads. We stopped in the small town of Broadford to check out Skye Jewelry, which we had received a flyer for when we crossed the bridge. We got a whole packet of tourist maps and various merchant/activity flyers when we paid our toll so at least we had some idea of what types of things were on the island.

As we proceed on, we take the eastern route along the coast to Uig. I cannot give a good enough description of what this place is like... it is like no place I had ever experienced. The pictures we took, I hope will give some perspective of what we saw, but I am afraid it won't do justice to what the actual scenery is like. I think the pictures will at least give a taste of how very different Skye is from many other places in Scotland.

We get to Uig. We travel along the road and see a sign that says "Kilmuir House", yeah, our Bed and Breakfast. Michael and I get to the door, I knock and a sweet woman answers. I introduce myself and tell her we have a reservation for the evening at her B and B. She looks at me with some confusion and says, "Ah... Nooo. I don't think so!" I continue to explain that I had called on Thursday to book a room and had talked with a gentleman. She asks me, "Could you have booked a room at the OTHER Kilmuir House?" The OTHER ONE??? AH... GEEEESH.... Apparently there are two Kilmuir Houses on the Island... one in Uig and one in Dunvegan, which is more on the western side of the island and is about 45 minutes away from Uig. The man of the house kindly calls over to the OTHER Kilmuir home to inquire whether or not they are expecting us... of course, they were! In hind sight, everything makes more sense. When I booked the room, I went on the website to get more detailed directions as to how to get to the B and B. It only gave me an availability calendar, the name of the place, a phone number and a brief description of its location. It did say something about Dunvegan. I later went back to see if there were further directions that I might have overseen and so I typed in "Kilmuir House" in my search engine and came up with the website to the Kilmuir House in Uig, which had great directions and a virtual tour of the property. I gave Michael the directions to the Uig place, he told me how we were going to get their and I told him I thought the place was in Dunvegan. It never crossed our minds that there could be two places of the same name on the island yet we continued to be a bit confused as to why one site said Dunvegan and one said Uig. Consequently, we aren't the only ones who have gotten the two places mixed up... this seems to happen rather often. You'd think the two properties would do something to clear up any confusion!

So... we drove another 45 minutes to the town of Dunvegan, which ended up not being all that much out of our way. We wanted to see the island anyway and so since we took the route to Uig, we got to see a large part of the eastern side. Now we will get to see the western side and we wanted to get to Dunvegan anyway since that is where Dunvegan Castle is located and is one of the island's largest attractions.

We arrive at Kilmuir House #2 and this rather tall, sort of chunky man, greets us at the car. He is dressed in a t-shirt and sweat pants and looks like the sort of fellow one would describe as "laid back". He introduces himself as Sam and immediately we can tell this guy is extremely warm, hospitable and very friendly. He guides us into his home, shows us our room(very simple, has a clean bathroom, and looks out over the hills which are covered with sheep!!!) and helps us get situated. Although the two Bed and Breakfast places have the same name, they are quite opposite of one another. The Uig location is done up in Victorian style decor, they do the whole tea and scone thing and have obviously been in the business for sometime. Sam, on the other hand, has a home that is simple. No frills, no extra fluff, just simple, plain and well lived in. The place was comfortable and would suit us just fine but it felt more like staying in someone's house rather than a B&B, which was fine by us.

Sam helped us find a place for dinner and so we made reservations at a restaurant about 1/4 mile away called "The Old School House". We enjoyed our dinner very much... a very good recommendation on Sam's part. I had their chilibean casserole and Michael had this incredible chicken that was stuffed with creamcheese and apples covered in a delectable sauce. The food was excellent!

After dinner, we get back to Sam's place and end up sitting in the living room with him and his wife, Carol. They are watching the U.K.'s popular show "Big Brother" which brings up lots of interesting topics of conversation. We ended up talking with Sam and Carol for a good hour or so about Scottish TV shows, a few political issues, various books that Carol recommended and living life on Skye. Eventhough the place was not fancy whatsoever, the hospitality was extraordinary. Sam and Carol both made us feel very welcome and always made sure we were comfortable. Sam seemed to really enjoy making sure his guests knew of the local sites and what the island had to offer. I know I will sleep well here!

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

2004-07-24T23:14:00.000+01:00

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.

Taking on the Highlands and Nighttime Creatures

2004-07-24T22:59:00.000+01:00

We had heard so much about how beautiful the Scottish Highlands were and how we must head up north to experience the beauty. Well, okay, here we go... hitting the roads to the Highlands. First stop, Inverness to experience a larger, more exciting Highland games.

We had seen the Inverness Highland Games advertised in a brochure and assumed that these games were on a more serious and grander scale than the ones we saw in Airth. We wanted to head north and eventually end up on the Isle of Skye so, why not check out the games in Inverness on the way? Oh, and yes, since we probably won't want to drive up to Inverness and Skye all in one day, we should definitely find a campsite in Inverness, camp overnight in Archie's minivan and then proceed on in the morning to Skye.

Well, before actually taking off for Inverness, I did some homework and found what I thought was the perfect camping spot. I found out that the highland games were to be taking place in Bught Park right in Inverness and what better place to find a campsite than one practically around the corner from the park... Bught Park Caravan and Campsite! Perfect! I called the campsite, talked to this man who apparently worked there or at least was a source one could contact to reserve a space and get questions answered. I got directions, sort of, from the guy and I thought all was set. Before leaving Glasgow to head to Inverness, we packed enough clothes to hold us until Tuesday and made sure we had blankets and pillows to use so that we would be warm enough while we slept in the van. Great! This should be fun and it should be easy to find the campsite when we are done at the games!

We drove up to Inverness, which took us about 3 ½ hours to get up there. Drove a little in the rain, had some traffic but overall, the trip wasn't too bad and we did end up getting there in plenty of time to see the afternoon events. We paid our entrance fee and quickly noticed that these highland games were set up pretty much the same way as the games in Airth. It was like going to Airth all over again but this time the park where the games were held was much larger. These games also had various tents you could go in to hear a band play, taste whiskey, see dancing and visit various booths or tables of different Scottish businesses. The same fair games and rides were also going on at these games for the kids to enjoy. We walked around a bit, sort of bored and wondering why the heck we drove all the way for this. Since we did spend 5 pound per person to get into these games, we did decide to stick it out a little longer and check out some of the sporting events that were going on. The weather was wet and cold so we decided to go sit in the covered stands where we would be warmer and also get a better view of the field where many of the sports were taking place. Good choice on our part to sit in the stands. We saw competitions such as tug-of-war, relay races, bike races, the famous caber toss and one event that we particularly favored, the men's weight toss for height competition. Men, who were very large and very strong, took this heavy weight and tossed it overhead behind them, trying to get it over this horizontal pole that would be raised every so often. The barrier started at about 10 feet and then gradually rose until it ultimately got to about 14 feet. These men continued to toss the weight, some being very successful with their tosses. There was this one rather tall guy, who turned out to be the winner, who was very good and seemed to have no trouble getting the weight over the pole. He was rather impressive, to say the least. We stayed for quite awhile and waited until we heard the bagpipes and drums band play during the grand finale.

It was around 5:30PM or so and it was about time we go and find Bught Park Caravan/Campsite. We went back to the van, I took out the paper that had the directions written on it and we took a look on the GPS to figure out where the heck this place is. From the directions the man gave me, it sounded as if you had to drive a little way to get to the campsite and when we looked on the map, the directions he gave really didn't match up with what we saw. Things were a little off. We drove around, trying to find signs that might help us make sense of where we were and where we wanted to go.. nothing seemed to make sense except some of the town names on the signs sort of matched up with directions. As we pulled out of Bught Park, we did manage to see this caravan place in the middle of the city, with RVs and tents practically stacked up on top of eachother. Kids were running around, cars on the road were whizzing by and we both thought this couldn't possibly be the place we were looking for.It just didn't add up. We also saw this indoor water park near the caravan site and I had mentioned to Michael that on the website for Bught Caravan, it mentioned that it was within walking distance to the Aquadome and some sports center. What we saw and what I had read, still weren't adding up. So... we drove around in circles for awhile, getting aggravated, irritated, tired and annoyed. We backtracked back to the park where the games were held, turned near the caravan site that we saw earlier and right in front of us was the sign we had been looking for "Bught Park Caravan". Crap! We had been driving around all this time and the place was right across the street from where we were. Not exactly sure why the man gave me the directions he did and why it didn't register in his head when I told him we were driving to Bught Park to see the Highland game and then to his campsite. It was all very confusing and a huge waste of time! We decide there was NO way we were going to stay at the caravan site and we were going to have to find another alternative.

We went into downtown Inverness and found a restaurant called "McDonagalls" to have some dinner while we figured out what our next move was going to be as far as where we were going to sleep for the night. Camping was still a possibility however I had been fighting a cold for the past few days, I was exhausted, feeling rather ill due to being out in the rainy cold weather and we came to the conclusion that it might be best for us to find an inexpensive hotel or B&B to stay in so that I don't end up getting more sick. Do we find somewhere in Inverness or do we venture out a bit toward Skye and find somewhere? We decided to move forward and find some place with a vacancy and a reasonable price.

Leaving Inverness

By this time, it was getting dark and late, we were driving in places that seemed to have very few accommodations and we were both getting a bit cranky! Not knowing exactly where we were and not having any clue where to search for a place to sleep, we were a bit concerned about our ultimate plans for the night and thought the worse thing that could happen is we pull off the side of the road, if need be and sleep in the van, which wasn't' exactly what I wanted to do. How I wanted desperately to find a place to sleep and was getting to the point that I was willing to pay just about anything to get a decent room.

We did drive and did eventually find some places to check out. We first came to a place way out in the middle of who knows where that had a room for 110 pounds a night... sounds nice but no thanks! We came to another place in a city called Contin. It looked rather empty and closed for the night but decided to see if I could find anyone who might be able to help us. I had no luck opening the door to the hotel so decided to enter the bar area to see if someone in there could tell me who I might talk to about a room. When I entered the bar the few folks who were in there were staring at me and watching every move I made as I asked the bartender who I needed to talk to about accommodations. I know I looked like hell, my eyes were bloodshot due to lack fo sleep, my hair a bit matted down from the rain and I was zipped up completely inside my long raincoat.. I must have been a rather scary sight! I talked to a man who was a bit stuffy and rough around the edges who then directed me to his wife who was in charge booking rooms. I asked about a room, she told me she did have a double room for 88pounds and so I went out to talk it over with Michael. We thought that might be a little more than we wanted to spend but might be open to it if we were unable to find anything else nearby. I asked the lady if we might be able to return in about 10 minutes or so and she rudely told me either I take the room now or leave. That helped me make the decision that we were not going to stay there and that we should press on a little further... we just had to find some place better!

We drove up the road a bit and came across this beautiful Best Western Hotel on this hill in Contin. We had a feeling it was going to be pricey, but at this point, I was willing to pay whatever we had to pay to sleep somewhere warm, clean, and safe. Went inside the hotel and unfortunately, they were all booked for the night. Geesh! The lady was very kind and told me we should head over to the next town of Strathpeffer where there were a number of B&Bs and a newly remodeled hotel that often has rooms available. We drove to Strathpeffer, and the majority of the places we saw had signs stating they had no vacancies! There was a lodge just up a bit that claimed they had vacancies. I went inside looking rather desperate, talked to the woman who ran the lodge with her husband and she told me she was very very sorry but just gave away her last single room to a couple who was also desperate and dead tired. Sounds familiar!!! She was a delightful woman and felt very sorry for me. She said she had been in situations like this before and understood completely how horrible it is to not find an available accommodation. She was determined to find a place for me and ended up spending about 20-30 minutes calling all types of accommodations within the little village of Strathpeffer and its surrounding area. She informed me that there was some sort of bicycling event going on and that is why we were having such a hard time finding a place available. She was so helpful and bent over backward to try and help. She came up empty handed with the exception of The National Hotel,she was a little hesistant to recommend since she had heard it wasn't the best hotel and had heard that music from the bar area was loud. It was over in a nearby town called Dingwall and they claimed to have a double room for 30 pounds per person per night. Fairly cheap, not sure what we were about to get ourselves into but it was worth a shot! So... on to Dingwall!

We get to Dingwall in the dark. It is wet outside, it is now around 11:30 at night and we can't seem to find where the hell this hotel is. It is supposed to be on the main road in the center of town but we aren't able to find the main road at this time of night. We pull into a gas station, ask the attendant, he thankfully knows where this hotel is and proceeds to tell us how to get there. At this point in time, I am so brain tired and can't see straight... nothing, no matter how clear it is, makes sense to me anymore. I am hoping Michael is hearing these directions that the guy is telling me outloud since all I hear is "blah, blah, main road, up over to the right, blah, blah". Excellent! Nothing is processing and by this time I feel like crying... California, home, friends and our own bed sounded oh so good right about now!

Halleluya! We somehow manage to come across The National Hotel. We pull up only to find several drunk people around the hotel.The hotel had an adjacent bar not to mention there were several pubs within the area. I leave Michael in the van while I go check out what this hotel is like and whether or not they actually have a room available. I go in and of course no one is at the reception desk. I see several folks in the bar but no one at the desk. I wait. I ring the bell for assistance. Nothing! Finally, this older man comes out of the bar area, shuffling his feet a bit and looking a little off key. I am just greatful to have gotten anyone's attention and completely disregard the fact that this just might be someone who is not in any condition to help me. I proceed to ask him if he works at the hotel and he mumbles something I am unable to hear. I tell him that I understand he has a double room available and was interested in taking it for the evening. He quickly comes over to me, stands inches away from my face and tells me he sure wishes he had a double room to share with me. By the look of his droopy eyes and slurred speech, I suddenly realize I am talking to a completely blizzed drunk who is coming on to me. Oh goody. Just want I needed at this point! A shouted out a sarcastic "Great!" in his face, he said he'd love to help me out but need to find his own room. He tells me I need to ring the bell. I thanked him and told him I had done that about 5 times already with no luck. All I can think of at this point in time is that this will all soon be over and I will be laughing at this experience at a later point. I was trying to find the humor of it all but it was getting more and more difficult as time went on!! I finally go into the bar area, ask some woman where the person at the desk might be and FINALLY a NORMAL HUMAN BEING comes out to help me. WE FINALLY HAVE A ROOM AND I actually have a key in my hand that will lead us to God only knows!

Of course the hotel has no elevator to use to get our luggage up to the 2nd floor, which is actually the 3rd floor, where our room is located. We park the van, reluctantly, in back of the hotel, grab our load of crap and decide it might work out better if shlep our belongings up the outside stairs of the fire escape to our floor. But of course, as we get to the top, the door is locked, so down we go, to the ground floor and take the steps up to our floor, dragging our belongings behind. We get to our floor but have a lot of trouble finding our room. The layout of the rooms don't seem to be in any logical order and when we finally get to our room it is tucked away up these few stairs in a corner. We unlock the door and I praying we don't find a room with cockroaches or some God awful smelly stinch. I am pleasantly surprised that the room looks decent and the bed looks rather comfy. Had it been a grass mat on the floor, it might have looked comfy to me at this point!!! I was sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo tired and just wanted to sleep. We get into bed, thankful to have found a place to sleep, we turn out the lights and Michael seems to have no problem falling asleep. I, hear every drunken person outside, every car passing by, every door closing in the hallway and every person having a loud and lenghthy conversation outside our door. I have a feeling this is going to be a loooooooong and restless night!

I stare at the ceiling and tell myself to keep thinking... this too shall pass and I WILL be able to laugh about this later with friends and family. I MISS HOME!!!! Tomorrow has GOT to be better!

Mr. Jones, Mr. Jones...

2004-07-23T23:53:00.000+01:00

Once again, Laurie did a great job on her blog so I'll just add a few tidbits here and there.

The other day I was watching a TV program where an architect was decrying the materials used in modern building. I don't remember exactly, but I think, "crap", "shite", and "garbage" were among her favorite terms. Now it is true that the older buildings here are generally made from really durable materials like stone and iron. But I am not sure that is the essential reason for their superior design aesthetic which clearly stands the test of time. The buildings are elegant and usually understated. But I digress...

Along the way to the concert we saw a beautiful clock covered in flowers in Princes Street Park. The park is right in the center of town between the "Old" and "new" Glasgow and has lots of grass and flowers. The park is interesting too, in that it is built in at least two levels. There was a natural valley between New Glasgow and the "mound" and so they built the park around that. Part of the park is at street level and part of it is hidden away from the noise and traffic some 30-40 feet or so down. Either way, you can look up and see formidable Edinburgh Castle.

When we reached the Mound we were, as Laurie mentioned, told by a policeman that we had to go around the block to find the queue. I have to say the police here have been amazingly polite and don't seem to feel they have to present an air of domination and/or terror that many police in the US use. In fact, their power comes from extreme politeness. In any case, the queue was quite long, but that gave me a few more minutes to take pictures. As always, I loved the detail of the buildings.

Anyway, the concert was nearly the best I'd ever heard. Yes, I do mean heard—not saw. Until we moved up to stands, we could hardly see what was going on. There were only two price points for the show and we'd had to pay the more expensive £40 so I was getting pretty disappointed as was Laurie. The first response we got from the "steward" at the top of the ramp was that we had to go to the box office (which was down the street!) Needless to say, I didn't like that answer since there were dozens if not hundreds of empty seats to be had up there! Soon we spoke to someone higher up the food-chain and she resolved the issue quite easily and nicely.

The show was pretty good including the fans. There was a woman who had a giant pair of men's boxers that said, "Tom Jones is a Sex Bomb". She taunted the security people by blocking an isle and not sitting down when directed to. Eventually she did, or they tossed her out, I am not sure which. She was too far a way to get a good shot. There were some women above us who were really into the show...and of course, the famous underwear was all over. Panties and bras were being tossed up toward the stage like we would throw a beach ball through a crowd. At one point, Tom wiped his face with a pair of panties. Well, I guess someone has to have adoring women throwing their underwear at him.

Tom put on quite the show, and part of the way through the concert, they lighted torches (yes, real torches, not flashlights) above the castle. Our seats provided a nice view of both the show and the castle directly behind. There was also a soldier stationed in front of the castle, but I think that was more for his pleasure than any real security. I should mention that since we arrived, we have seen almost no sign of the high-security measures we're accustomed to in the post 9/11 United States. A sad commentary on the "home of the free".

Makes me wonder how the election and that Democratic convention are going, anyway?

On the way home, we got to see some great views of Edinburgh at night which we hadn't seen previously. It was really stunning. We made our way to the train station and had some luck. The train we intended to catch back to Queen's Street Station wasn't due for 30 minutes because it was so late. However, the train to Central Station, a few minutes closer to our house, was uncharacteristically late and we were able to catch it just a few minutes after we got to the station. Now that's service. Since we missed the last bus for the night, we took a cab home. The driver was very friendly and told us that he'd been in California a few years ago…1966 I think he said. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I might not have been born when he was last there.

An Evening With Mr. Jones

2004-07-23T18:23:00.000+01:00

Edinburgh again???!!! I know, I know. We have already gone to Edinburgh several days last week however, we HAD to return today in order to attend the Tom Jones concert we have been waiting to go to. Tonight was the night it was going to happen, but much more later in this broadcast -- let me first tell you about the day.

We jumped on the 2:15 train to Edinburgh and upon arriving, went straight to the National Art Gallery to see the exhibits we had not been able to get to, due to the gallery closing, when we went to the gallery last week. There were two exhibits in particular that we wanted to see and made a point of arriving in Edinburgh early enough to stop by the gallery to finish our tour. The first exhibit we wanted to get to was that of the Scottish artists. We viewed many paintings, sketches and watercolors created by many well-known Scottish artists. We also went to the floor that had paintings done by French Impressionist Artists such as Monet, Van Gogh, Degas and Cezanne. Many of the art pieces we looked at are huge and cover large sections of the gallery walls. As you step back and take time to look at the detail in these masterpieces, some actually are so full of detail that they draw you into the picture. I had taken an art history course in college way back when, that I will never forget. It gave me an appreciation for art and what artists convey in their pieces and it has provided me with a manner in which to look at art in a different way than I might have had I not taken the course. I think I enjoyed looking at these remarkable pieces more so than I might have had I not had the experience I had in my college course.

It was getting closer to concert time but we still had time to grab a bite of dinner before we had to head to the show. We ended up back at Rose Street at the same little pub we had eaten once before while in Edinburgh. We ate outside this time around and enjoyed people watching while we ate. Our tickets said the show was to start at 6:30PM, but we were told by the guy who sold us the tickets that the show would actually begin around 7:30. Not knowing what to expect, we decided to head up the Edinburgh Castle Esplanade where the concert was to be held. We took the usual route up the Mound to where we usually would walk to the castle only to be redirected by Police to head up further up the road, turn right and meet up with the rest of the crowd along the Royal Mile. OH MY GOD! When we arrived at the Royal Mile, just shortly after 6:30, the lines had already started forming. These were no puny lines... we are talking huge lines going down, down and further down the Royal Mile. Thousands of people were all lined up ready to see Tom Jones and I have to say, with as many people lined up, it was the most organized, well-controlled crowd I had been in in a long time. When we got to the line, we were fairly far from the entrance to the Esplanade but not as far as some folks who had lined up WAY behind us. The crowd started moving closer to the castle at around 6:40, still in an orderly fashion with no major backups. We entered the Esplanade rather quickly and found our seats which we were rather impressed with AT FIRST. The way the Esplanade is set up, there are seats in the upper stands to the left and right of the stage and way in the back. The stand seating is what we wanted originally being that these seats overlook the stage and there doesn't seem to be a bad seat in these areas. We were told when we purchased our tickets that there weren't any of these seats available and the only seats that were left were on the ground floor or what is better known as "The Stalls". When we got to the seats we were quite close to the stage and were very pleased with what we ended up with. Since we had found our seats so quickly, we still had a good 40 minutes before showtime so we killed time by reading our books and watching people. As time went on, and it got closer to 7:30 we noticed that there were still a lot of seats not filled and were wondering if for some odd reason this wasn't going to be the sell out crowd we expected it to be. We waited and waited a little longer and then around 7:30 the show began, starting with the opening act. For about a half hour, before Tom came on, a band called "The Magnets" performed. Not knowing what to expect and not ever hearing about this band, my first impression was that they MIGHT be entertaining and possibly something to enjoy until the REAL STAR came on. Out came these 6 guys all dressed in black suits with ties, looking rather handsome I must say. If they didn't sound good, at least they would be something to look at! They broke out in their first song and started harmonizing. Uh oh, I though, another Back Street Boys kind of group. I listened some more and realized, as they were getting into their song that although I heard the bass, drums, and an entire rhythm section, I saw no instruments whatsoever! Where the hell was the band? What the???? Absolutely amazing! Not only did these guys sound great, two of the six guys WERE the rhythm section! Yes, there were no instruments anywhere. These two guys, with their own mouths, were making sounds so incredibly unreal you'd swear there was a drum, a bass, symbols, etc. somewhere. We were so impressed that we had to pick up one of their CD's. The guys announced that after the show, the six of them would be hanging out by the souvenir kiosks to sign their CD. We were going to take advantage of this opportunity!!!

The Magnets had done their magic and now it was time to wait a bit more until Tom Jones was to come out. We now noticed that all the seats that had been empty were now all full and the Esplanade was now pretty full, that is EXCEPT for many of the seats still open in the stands. How odd... I thought we were told there weren't any of these left. Oh well, we still have awesome seats. I particularly thought we'd be just fine with our seats because consistently, during the waiting time between performances, there would be an announcement that requested audience members keep umbrellas closed in the event of rain, that no recording or picture taking was allowed and for the safety and courtesy of others, all people should remain sitting during the performance. Awesome! We really do have great seats... NOT!

About 8:30, the one, the only Tom Jones! There he is... got a great view... well, I did have a great view. Suddenly I could see the wave of people starting from the front all the way to our row quickly rise to their feet. All I could see were backs of heads and obnoxious people yelling on their cell phones and waving at their friends who were sitting far away from the stage... lucky people... they could probably see a whole lot better than we probably could at that point.

Tom started to sing a slow song. People sat down. I thought we had it made until, boom! He started up with a faster pace song and it was all over... more heads, more arms flying around and no view of what we came to see. The folks who were sitting next to us suddenly left... probably to find better seats. There aren't many things that get me really upset but the more people stood up, the more I was getting really annoyed. Michael suggested we go up to the stands and try and grab some seats up there since it was clear that many of the seats up there were not sold. I was a little hesitant at first to give that a go but certainly wasn't going to stand for paying 40 pounds to see a bunch of heads bobbing in front of me. Okay... let's go find the better seats!

We proceeded up the stands, went up the stairs that lead to the stand seats and was greeted by one of the security people asking to see our tickets. I told her we did not have tickets for this section and was very upset that we paid what we did to not see Tom Jones. She told us she could not allow us up in the stands and that if we wanted to either get a refund or exchange our tickets we could go down to the box office which was way down at the bottom of the Royal Mile and try to get new tickets. Nope, not an option. We wanted to speak to someone who could help us. After a little more pleading and explaining our frustration, the security gal told us if we got off the stairs there would be a lady from the box office in a second to talk to us. She did show up, we grabbed her and told her our story and she immediately told us to go up and find seats to our liking. Whew!

Found some good seats and had a great view not only of Tom Jones, but Edinburgh Castle all lit up. Now this is what I call good seating. We waved at Tom as he waved up to the stands and we were able to stand up and dance when we wanted without bothering others around us and vice versa. We had terrific views of crazy folks having a grand old time throwing underwear at Tom, of people in the stands holding signs of various sorts and even a guy in the floor seating who completely stripped down to his birthday suit (I, unfortunately didn't catch this but Michael saw this bold fan!) There were these woman who were each wearing a t-shirt that had a word on it. When they stood together and were in the correct order they spelled out "We love you Tom. Blow a kiss!" They were really into is. When Tom sang "What's New Pussycat?" a fan, who was dressed as a cat, went down to the bottom of the stand area so Tom could see her clearly. That was rather cute! There were all kinds there of all ages and it was fun to see so many people really get into the concert. As the concert went on, it was evident that security could care less whether or not folks were taking pictures. There were so many people with cameras taking pictures, despite the many announcements that were made telling everyone no photographs of any kind were allowed. I was afraid that our camera would be taken away if we took any pictures but so many folks around us were, right in front of security, that we figured it might be okay. We did get a couple of good shots, which was rather exciting!

It was a great show and Tom Jones, whatever age he is, still has the strong, deep voice, still has the charm and still has that sexy charisma. The guy is good! He sang many songs that neither Michael nor I recognized however, he did sing many old and some new songs that we did know so all in all, the show was rather amazing! At the end of the concert, when Mr. Jones said his good nights and thanked Edinburgh for coming, he went off stage and from where we were sitting we could see the back of the stage where some of the trailers were that might have been used for make-up or changing rooms. As Tom was exiting to go back stage, we could see him come out of a bottom opening off the stage that led to the back. Some fans around us yelled at him, he turned around and several of us were able to wave and give some extra good-byes as he waved back. Too bad we didn't capture that on camera!

Before heading back to the train station, as planned, we stopped by where all the souvenirs were being sold and stumbled through the crowd to find at least one of the Magnets to sign our CD.

We were able to find both Colin Griffith Brown and Andy Frost, the two amazing guys who are the rhythm section of the group, and had them both sign our CD.

An amazing night an amazing concert. Now off to bed to get some amazing sleep, I hope, in order to start fresh tomorrow and begin yet another amazing adventure!

A Trip To Ayr

2004-07-22T16:28:00.000+01:00

Today,another adventure away from Glasgow BUT first, we must start the day with a long awaited lovely cup of tea with Phoebe, the English neighbor across the street. We headed over to her place around 10:45AM only to be welcomed by none other than Phoebe herself... rather tattered looking, full head of hair in her face. She apologized for her attire, which I though suited her perfectly since I perceive her as being the "busy mum" who is doing about 5 things at once. She invited us downstairs where her main kitchen area is located and we settled in at her table, ready for some good conversation. Her 5-year-old daughter, Molly, was at the table when we arrived, looking quite cute in her pajamas, which she was still dressed in and which Mom was trying to get her to change out of for the 2 hours or so we were there. When we got our tea, we noticed Phoebe had put milk in it without asking our preference. Although I rarely drink milk with my tea while in the states, I do like drinking my tea that way and had forgotten that many people in England drink "white tea". Makes sense that Phoebe would automatically assume that we wanted milk, since she is originally from London and probably assumes everyone drinks tea this way.

We spent about 2 hours chatting with Phoebe and occasionally her high-energy husband, Dominic, who dashed in for a bit with fast food breakfast for his family and then out again to take care of work related issues (he is a local media personality who apparently writes TV reviews for one of the papers and does some radio announcing, we think). Both Phoebe and Dominic are a kick in the pants and have a terrific sense of humor. So down to earth, so honest about everything... they tell it like it is, without withholding a thing! We talked about everything from the housing market in Scotland vs. the US/Bay Area, schools, and individual backgrounds. It was a delightful way to start the day.

We left about 12:30 and headed out to the town of Ayr (pronounced "Air"), which not only is a pretty town but is also the birthplace of Scottish poet, Robert Burns. When we got into town, we headed toward the city center to find, the tourist office. We found signs that showed the general direction as to where the office was but it seemed that parking was going to be a bit of a hassle since it looked to us that the tourist office was located down a pedestrian only area. We drove around, and around, and around, and around (literally!!!) the same block to find parking. We finally did find a space but discovered that in order to park on the street one had to find a local shop that sold "parking vouchers". We walked up and down the street in search of a shop that might sell one of these vouchers to us, but came up empty handed, ironically enough. You'd think that if these vouchers are necessary for parking in the area, that more shops would sell them. Apparently, not the case! So.. we got back in the car, drove some more up and down the block and luckily found a space that surprisingly enough, had a beauty salon right next to it that advertised that they sold parking vouchers inside... AMEN!

Once we got our parking situation all squared away, we walked around the center of town toward the tourist info office. The town of Ayr is cute and as with many Scottish cities we had experienced, had a very old feeling to it. I enjoyed the city, but not as much as many of the other ones we had been to. When we arrived at the tourist information office, we asked the man that was working there if he could advise us of what we might be able to see since we had arrive in Ayr on the later side and many things in the next several hours of our arrival were going to close. He was very nice and told us we should probably spend our time over at the Robert Burns National Heritage Park in Alloway. It is in this park that visitors will find the cottage where Burns was born, the Robert Burns Museum and Gardens. Not far from the park is the Tam O'Shanter Experience (this is a character that Burn wrote about in one of his works)and the Burns Monument. We got to the park and decided that we really only had enough time to check out the cottage and the museum and so we did.

The Burns cottage was sort of neat to go through although it took all of about 10 minutes at most. It consisted of about 4 small rooms and had a fair audio recording of the telling of how life was like for Burns and his family while they lived in the cottage. From the cottage, we walked along the garden area that was located adjacent to the cottage. There was a pathway that led us to the Cottage Museum, which we spent some time in and found very interesting. The museum had actual manuscripts of Burns's work... from some of his very famous poems, tales songs to letters he wrote to various people, especially his love, Mary Campbell. The museum did a great job letting about Burns's life as a child all the way until his death at age 37.

From the museum, we walked down the road to see if we had any chance of seeing some of the other Burns attractions. Unfortunately, due to the time we arrived in Ayr and the time we spent at the cottage and museum, we were not able to see some of the other related Burns exhibits that were part of the Heritage Park.

So, we drove back down to the City Center of Ayr and this time around, we found parking to me MUCH easier, with no voucher required to park in the area we found. W. By the time we got back to the center of town, many of the shops and restaurants that were previously open, were now closed. The town seems rather deserted and dead, with not a whole lot going on. I guess when closing time hits, the town virtually shuts down and everyone heads home for the evening! We strolled a long the streets for a bit and then took our journey across one of the small bridges that took us to a walk along the river that went through the city. I am still not exactly sure which river we were walking along but regardless of the name, we enjoyed the scenery that lied before us. There were beautiful swans swimming along the river, the silhouettes of the old town buildings and church steeples rose about the river, giving a feeling of history. We took some time to sit on a bench that was on the river walk and enjoyed the feeling of the sunshine hitting our backs and the view of the river glistening in the sun.

From the river, we crossed a large foot bridge that took us back to the center of the city and we headed back to our car. We really weren't ready to head back to Glasgow quite yet and weren't ready for dinner either. What we really wanted to do is to take advantage of the sunshine that we still left and find a nice place outside to read our books and possibly enjoy a drink. We found the Carleston Hotel right across the street from where we parked the van and noticed it had a nice patio out in front to sit and enjoy the outdoors. We ordered our pints of ale and cider (not being much of a beer drinker, I have "fancied" the various ciders that many of the pubs carry)and read a bit on the patio. We sat for awhile, the cider going right to my head (doesn't take much for me to get buzzed on alcohol... WHAT A LIGHT WEIGHT!)and decided it was time to go when the sun decided to be uncooperative and hide behind the clouds that were forming in the sky. The wind picked up a bit too and what was a pleasant day of warmth and sunshine, turned into a cold and cloudy evening! It was time to pack up and drive back to Glasgow!!

By the time we reached Glasgow, it was beyond dinnertime and we were VERY hungry. Not knowing where we were going to find a restaurant that would be open, we did recall seeing a place downtown that we wanted to try called "Spice Garden". Lucky for us, Spice Garden was open until something crazy like 4:00AM. We entered the restaurant to be greeted immediately by an Indian gentleman that could have possibly been the owner. He was very happy that we took the time to come to Spice Garden and did everything possible to make sure we were comfortable and understood the HUGE menu. The menu was rather overwhelming and had all kinds of Indian, Italian and European dishes. The atmosphere was a little odd in a sort of entertaining way. Neon lights lit many of the archways around the windows, there were neon lights shining over the bathroom doors... a blue male figure for the mens' bathroom and a pink female figure for the women's' bathroom. We particularly thought it was funny to see music videos projected on the wall over the bathrooms with music playing in the background that did not correlate whatsoever with what was being shown on the wall. While Brittany Spears was on the wall, Tom Jones was playing in the background... strange! The best part of the restaurant environment was that the place was located sort of off the beaten path of the center of downtown and was placed right directly underneath train tracks. These tracks are used on a consistent basis and while we were eating, many trains traveled across the track above us and shook the entire restaurant. The first time it happened, it was a bit unsettling until we realized what it was! Despite the peculiar atmosphere, the food and service were fantastic. We really enjoyed our Indian food (I had some sort of mixed vegetable dish that was excellent and Michael enjoyed this terrific lamb dish that had a sumptuous curry type sauce).

When we left Spice Garden, we noticed that we were so close to the Glasgow Bridge that leads traffic from the outer parts of Glasgow into the City Center. We had crossed over the bridge so many times at night on buses and vowed to come back to the bridge at night either by car or bike to take pictures when it was all lit up. We were excited to see we were just a walk away from the bridge and better yet, we had our camera with us! We took the time to take some spectacular bridge pictures and were very excited to finally get the opportunity to get some great shots at night.

Another delightful day gone, another exciting day ahead for tomorrow. Come back tomorrow and read about our return to Edinburgh complete with an evening with Tom Jones! Until then...

House tour

2004-07-21T23:56:00.000+01:00

Well since we are more than half way through our stay we thought we should provide a tour of our digs. Most of the pictures are self explanatory, but some aren't so here goes...

The house is a comfortable size--for a family of seven! It is a four story house with rustic wood floors throughout the house. The basement level is now a separate unit owned or rented by a young couple.

When you enter the house, there is an excellent spiral stairs. Just off the left side is the living room which is warm and inviting. They have a great fire place and a piano. I know one of the Lacey children, Myriam, plays drums. I think that Archie's wife plays piano. No doubt there are a lot of happy family times spent in this warm home.

There is a front loading laundry machine, and drying is done on a line in the kitchen that lowers from the ceiling. Apparently this is a fairly common thing here as it is often too wet or cold to dry laundry outside.

The bedrooms are on the second and third floors (not including the basement). The kid's rooms are really cool. Gabriel, the Lacy's only son has a really cool spiderman bed. The master bedroom is amazingly big and it is going to be hard to go home to our little bedroom.

The showers here are interesting. They have electric-powered heaters so you never run out of hot water. Although they seemed awkward and perhaps scary to me at first, I'm pretty sold on them now.

Well enough blogging--time for some sleep.

The Burrell Collection

2004-07-21T19:40:00.000+01:00

We took it nice and easy and lounged around the house for the better part of the morning. Since I felt a lot better today and we never really left the house the past two days, we decided we needed to get out of the house for at least a little while. We had been told that where we are staying is not far at all from The Pollok County Park, which houses both the Burrell Collection and the Pollok House. We drove over to the park sort of on the later side of the afternoon so we really only got to go through the Burrell Collection Museum. Of particular interest to us a temporary exhibit on all the different Chinese art pieces Sir William Burrell had collected over time.

We browsed around the museum and saw the huge collection of art artifacts that Burrell collected from all over the world. In the first room we entered, we saw various stone sculptures, reliefs and vessels from Egypt. We walked through a room that had ancient Greek and Roman vases, sculptures and jewelry. The Gothic Art room consisted of a small collection of religious art from medieval times such as wood sculptures, precious metalwork and ivory carvings. There were wooden church furnishings in this area as well..these were rather large and full of detail.
We saw stained glass hanging in one room that has lights behind the glass to bring out the color and there were other pieces of stained glass in one of the hallways that had the natural light of the outdoors shining through the colorful glass pieces. Around the corner, was an impressive room of European armor and weapons that date back from the 13th to the 17th century. My favorite room was the tapestry gallery. In this gallery hung GIGANTIC wall tapestries of various subjects. These were massive and full of rich detail. I needed to sit back from many of them to really take a good look at everything that was going on in each tapestry in order to take to take in the story that was told through each hanging. One other very interesting display of Burrell's collection was the Islamic Art Gallery. It is in here that one will find a collection of carpets and rugs from the Muslim world as well as early Islamic ceramics and metalwork. Many of the artefacts come from areas stetching from Turkey to India and date from the 9th to the 19th century. To complete our walk through the collection, we ended on the top floor looking at the paintings Burrell included in his collection. His collection consisted of works by French 19th century artists such as Degas, Cezanne and Boudin.

We had had enough art for one day and decided to see if we could get into the Pollok House just up the road within the park. Unfortunately, we arrive at the house just a little after 4:30, which is the last time folks can enter the house for the day. Oh well... not something we felt we HAD to see.

It was getting close to an early dinner hour and since we were fairly close, we returned to Battlefield Rest, which is a little Italian place we had gone to before. In a previous blog entry it was mentioned that this little place has once been a tram station long ago. It is cute and quaint and has a very friendly atmosphere. I had a delicious vegetable crepe and Michael has this very good Margarita and caramelized onion pizza. We both enjoyed their homemade minestrone soup for starters. As we were getting ready to leave, one of the waiters asked us our nationality. When we told him we were from America he seemed rather surprised and informed us he though we were Norwegian or Scandinavian. This certainly was the first time I had been indentified as something other than American... it was kinda neat!

Stopped off across the street to see if Phoebe, one of the very sweet and generous neighbors, was available for a cup of afternoon tea. She seemed rather frazzled and told us her newborn son was having quite a day and that tomorrow would be a much better day for a visit. We hope it will work out to spend time with her, her sweet daughter, Molly and her baby son. It would be a great way to start another wonderful day in Scotland. We also hope to scope out the city of Ary, as we have been told this is quite a lovely place to see. We'll see how the day goes and will let you know what we ended up doing in tomorrow's blog entry.

We appologize for this temporary interruption...

2004-07-20T17:35:00.000+01:00

Laurie wasn't feeling well so we took it easy. I did some reading, worked a lot on the pictures for the blog, and watched more BBC.

The pictures are now organzied by day. There were just getting to be too many to throw all in one big directory. By the way, the pictures are much better in full screen mode, but I don't know of an easy way to present them that way so for now this will have to do. Stay tuned.

BUMMMER!

2004-07-19T22:22:00.000+01:00

Caught a Scottish cold... they aren't much different from American ones. I guess today will be spent resting and trying some good old American remedies... soup, tea and lots of o.j.! Hopefully, tomorrow all will be better!

A New Experience

2004-07-18T20:50:00.000+01:00

In one of the many travel brochures we have collected, we noticed that their was an announcement that mentioned something about Highland Games in Falkirk, which is relatively close by to Glasgow. Not knowing anything about Highland Games or what even happens at one, I thought it would be a kick to go and see if we could find these games. It seems as though there are Highland Games of some sort all over Scotland, some on a very large scale, some much smaller. We had no idea what to expect at these games so it was worth at least trying to see if we could find them.

Our first frustration of the day was not being able to find anything that showed where North Green Park was in the town in Airth. In fact, where the hell is Airth (EER-TH) anyway? Well, it we did seem to find where the small nothing town was ( I guess the consider it Falkirk or a part of Falkirk) but nothing helped us find the park. We decided we had nothing better to do so we hopped in the van and headed out towards Stirling because both Falkirk and Airth are very close to Stirling. We were driving not really knowing where the heck we were going and Michael's GPS was no help since it seemed to be running low on its battery. We continued following signs toward Stirling, making contingency plans to spend time in Stirling if we were unable to find Airth. Of course, to top off everything, we hit a place on the motorway where they were doing major construction and sat in traffic for a good 20-30 minutes.

We somehow, surprisingly enough, found Airth and since it is so small, we were able to find signs that led us to the Airth games. As we drove to the car park, we saw that we really weren't driving to what we know as a park... it was actually a huge field. The games were held on this huge grassy area, nothing like what we would consider a park to be. As we entered through the entrance gate, we were bombarded with what lied before us. I couldn't stop laughing at what I saw! There was so much going on all at the same time it was a little overwhelming at first. You had bike racers riding their bikes around the outer circumfrence of the field, runners were running on the same track, in the middle of the field there was a corner where there where young ladies competing in highland dancing, at another part of the field these huge men were throwing heavy weights around and then there was the tug-of-war teams pulling the rope back and forth. It was absolutely crazy but quite interesting. I wouldn't say this was a huge event; it was more like the local community highland games... with games and rides for the kiddies as well. Oh and yes, of course, plenty of food booths were there. Since we hadn't had lunch, we figured we would pick up something at the games. I was a little hesitant as most of the food that was there was high in grease or drenched in sauce. I was happy to find a sign at one of the food booths that said they had "chicken wraps".. PERFECT! I felt this might be the more healthier alternative available at the time. Well, let me just say that the Scottish chicken wrap definitely ISN'T close to what I would consider an American wrap to be. I watched the lady prepare my wrap and almost cringed at what she was doing to my poor wrap! At first things looked okay. I saw lettuce, cucumbers, tomatoes being placed in the tortilla... all good! Uh oh, then came the fried battered chicken pieces followed by some sort of salsa sauce, cheese, and the BIG UH OH... MAYONAISE!! Mayo seems to be a well-used condiment around here. I guess I have learned you have to be careful for what you ask for. I should have settled for the chicken burger!

We stayed for quite awhile at the games. Met a cute poodle named Casper, talked to Casper's owner, huddled under one of the tarps where this man who was trying to sell various types of clothing was getting very upset with all of us for coming into his area to try and get out of the sudden pouring rain! The rain blew over rather rapidly and we continued to watch the various sports and dances. We even caught this guy doing a brief show with his eagle which was pretty fascinating. Glad we stayed at long as we did because I felt we were able to see so much of all the various things that were going on (even caugh bagpipe competitions and a band of bagpipers!). We plan, later on, to head up to Inverness to catch some other Highland Games that we anticipate will be a much larger venue! That should be interesting to see and to compare with Airth's little event!

We headed back to the homestead and relaxed a bit and had some dinner. Then around 8:00PM we went over to Daniel and Patricia's house. These folks are friends of some friends of our who graciously invited us over for drinks and tea. What an absolutely delightful couple. We talked quite about about politics, Scottish culture, sites we haven't yet seen and got to know eachother. They are very nice people with such hospitality. Daniel is quite a character.. he is quite a history buff! Daniel and Patricia are both Jewish and advised us to go to one of Scotland's oldest synagogues, Garnet Hill. Patricia's mother, in fact, is the Vice President of the synagogue and she said she would try and arrange a tour if we so desired. Maybe not a tour, but depending on time, we may join Daniel, and his 1o month old son, Jacque, for services before we leave Scotland. We'll see!

Our first Highland Games

2004-07-18T17:01:00.000+01:00

We found out there was a Highland Games that was variously described in Airth, Sterling, and somewhere else I can't remember. It turns out it was near Sterling in Airth. We never did find the park it was held in on the web, or in my GPS software. After much research, we determined that we couldn't take the train. We'd have to take the van.

Although the batteries on my GPS wore out part of the way there, we found it fairly easily. The games were held in something between a farm field and an open space—not a park as we'd think of it. The fair was like a three-ring circus. Foot and bicycle races going on at the same time as traditional Scottish sports like the Keber and the 16 pound hammer, and a heavy ball. A couple of the competitors were big guys from America. We just can't seem to get away from these Americans! The 16 pound hammer throw was interesting. To do this sport, you wear boots with big blades stick to the front of your boots. Unlike the greek style hammer throw, you dig your fit into the grass and spin the hammer around you. I think generally it is clock-wise, but it may depend on whether you are right or left handed.

There were also dance and bag pipe competitions. There were also some falconers with beautiful birds. Ironically, one of them was also from America. These birds can no longer be imported, but they hope to breed the ones they have. I got some really good shots of them flying, soaring, and doing their thing.

Of course there were bag pipes and a Scottish band which played very stirring music.

Alongside the traditional Scottish culture were some amusement rides for kids and food. One of the common dishes seems to be “chips and curry” which is just what it sounds like. I've come to fancy my “chips and curry” although I bet I can't find it anywhere in the US.

Kids seem to be having a great time. Some were dancing, some were racing, and some were just playing.

I think the pictures from the games are among the best so far. I encourage you to take a look at them.

Down day

2004-07-17T16:59:00.000+01:00

Saturday we caught up on sleep, laundry and cleaned up a bit around the house. We also made plans to to go to a Highland Games tomorrow, which sounded very exciting.

What Castle?

2004-07-16T19:10:00.000+01:00

Yes, as Michael had indicated in his entry, we were bound and determined to use our passport travel tickets to check out yet another castle right outside of Edinburgh. When checking with the lady in the tourist office as to what the best way to get to the castle, she gave me the impression that there were loads of buses in the heart of Edinburgh that would take us directly to Craigmillar Castle.

Not knowing really where we were going and looking probably very lost as we were traveling along on the bus, the natives reassured us that we were heading in the right direction. Bless his heart, this kind older gentleman told us to get off at this particular bus stop and to ask anyone around how to get to the castle, they would know. Well, actually, that wasn't quite correct. We immediately asked the first people we saw where the castle was and how to get there. They both looked at us and in their very heavy accents said, "Castle? Castle? There is the castle in Edingburgh! No Castle... Castle in Edinburgh!" They were convinced that the only castle around was the one we already had visited. We tried to explain that we were fully aware of the Edinburgh Castle but we really just wanted to find Craigmillar. They seemed very perplexed about our questions and told us to enter the road across the street from the bus stop that just happened to have signs that said "Craigmillar Gardens". Well, at least it we knew we had to be close if the sign had the name "Craigmillar" on it.

Craigmillar Gardens? You've got to be kidding! No gardens or castle anywhere here. We were now entering a low income housing project that had seen better days and from our lack of success at the bus stop, we weren't about to ask the neighborhood locals where the castle was.
We walked and walked and eventually saw the castle on the hill (how anyone around this place couldn't have known it existed, is beyond me). We couldn't quite figure out just how to get there so we followed odd paths that led us up hills, through trees, in large fields and wha-la... we finally got to Craigmillar!

Quite an interesting place. I think Michael did a great job telling a little about the place and providing great pictures to show you how very different it was to some of the MAJOR castles we had already seen. It wasn't much to look at but I was glad we made the stop to see it. It certainly gave us another taste at what the differences of castles can be like. While walking through the various entry ways and up and down steps, I couldn't help thinking about how wonderful a place it is for kids to play hide and seek! That is when we saw the kids dressed in their "armor", sheilds in hand, having a great time protecting THEIR castle!

Aside from seeing Craigmillar, our other mission of the day was to get tickets to the Tom Jones concert on the 23rd. You might be asking, why in the world would two 37 year old Americans want to go see Tom Jones??? Well, we had the option of getting tickets to see Donny Osmond or Cliff Richards but neither of these guys, we felt, were worth the cost of a ticket. For those of you who only associate Tom Jones with his older stuff such at "What's Up Pussycat" or "It's Not Unusual", we should inform you that he has recently made a come back with some new music that has a new sound and that appeals to "the younger crowd". He is quite the hip singer that usually draws an audience that spans across generations! He is also Welsh, so we figured , although he is not Scottish, being Welsh or Irish is the next best thing as far as seeing a "local" performer! Best of all, we will be seeing him at the Edinburgh Castle Esplanage which happens to be the same place that the Military Tatoo happens. What a fabulous place for a concert... I am REALLY excited about this event.

I was happy to see that Michael found some really cool shoes. He has been wanting to go to the Clarks Shoe Store in Glasgow to buy some really comfy shoes however, while we were in Edinburgh, the Clarks store was having a 1/2 off sale so we hit that at a perfect time!

Walking around Edinburgh was relaxing. As Michael shared in this write up, we came across Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs drinking and smoking outside one of the local pubs. We were curious what the occasion was for "dressing up". I went up to the ladies and asked if Snow White was the bachelorette of the evening, thinking this may be some kind of bachelorette party. Snow White sort of laughed at me and quickly corrected me by telling me that she was celebrating her 40th birthday. I asked if we could take their picture, then ran out of the way just in time for Snow White and her Dwarfs to call me back to join them in the picture! What a great way to turn 40! Hmmm... 2 years to go for me.... maybe I will dress up as some character and make my friends wear silly costumes around San Jose!

We had an enjoyable dinner at a local pub and I was glad I finally got my fix of a good vegetable stir-fry. He had a leisurely dinner as we had time to kill before heading to The Stand comedy theater.

We still had time to kill before the comedy show so we wandered down the road closer to where the show was going to be and found a park. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing slightly and we really just wanted to go into the park and relax for a bit before heading to the show. The gates all around the park were locked so we decided to sit on a curb near the park. Michael continued reading his Bill Clinton book and I just watched the cars and people go by. Glasgow is certainly a great place for people watching. Not that much was going on but it was fun just to watch the going ons of the early evening hours.

7:30 PM -- it was time to start heading to the the comedy shop. We get there and realize that we have another hour and a half to kill before the 9:00PM show starts. Oh well, more opportunity for people watching. We watched the crowd for awhile and for a time, it seemed as though Michael and I were the oldest people there. As time went on and it got closer to the start of the show, the crowd started to vary quite a bit. There were older people, younger people and mid aged folks. When the show started, the hostess of the show, did a great job letting everyone know what an international audience there was that night. A family from Canada, with mom being Dutch, was sitting in front of us. Some lasses from Ireland were there as well as ladies fro, Austraila. Then there were folks from England who got picked on quite a bit along with the folks from Glasgow. It is quite apparent that there is quite a clash of heads between the English and Scottish and even between Glasgow people and the people of Edinburgh. It rather amusing seeing the rivalry between these groups. As Americans, we got picked on quite a bit too. We were accused of being vegetable and fruit freaks and having a tremendous influence on many cultures, especially British culture, around the world. As Michael said, the gay comedian from SF was really the only one who made reference to American politics and culture... he was pretty lame but it was sort of neat listening to him make jokes about things that happen in the Bay Area.

at 11:15PM we dashed out of the comedy place in order to catch the last train to Glasgow which left at 11:30. We were only about a 10 minute walk to the train station so there wasn't too big of a worry not catching the train. It did mean we had to leave when this very funny guy from Ireland was doing his gig and we couldn't dawdle much... we had to walk rather quickly to make sure we weren't going to have to spend the night in Edinburgh!

Big plans

2004-07-16T15:23:00.000+01:00

Today we had a plan. We were going ot make the most of the Historical Passports we purchased by visiting at least two sites—Craigmillar Castle and Lilinthgow Castle. We also wanted to go back to Edinburgh. Now Lilinthgow is a bit outside of Edinburgh so this time we waited in the queue for the ticket counter to find out how to get there most economically. It turns out that when you buy a ticket to a destination, it is also good for route. So all we had to do is buy the same tickets we had been buying and get off at Lilinthgow. Then, we could get back on the train and end up at Edinburgh. What a deal. Even better, we were just on time to get a train and we were off straight-away.

However, for some reason the train didn't “feel right” to either of us. This was probably because we have been reading, sleeping or talking, on the train and not looking out all that much. It turned out that the train would take us to Edinburgh, but it did not stop at Lilinthgow. We could have gotten off and gone back a couple of stations, but we would have spent some time doing that and we were worried about spending that much time so we just went on to Edinburgh.

When we arrived, we wanted around the train station a bit. Laurie wanted to use the bathroom but we didn't have the proper change. We went up to the tourist information center to find out how to get to Craigmillar Castle. Turns out there were several buses to take and we found our way over to one after getting a bit lost first.

It wasn't for the worse however, first, we saw our second bag pipe player. Next, we found the Tattoo store and decided to get the video for the Tattoo. Unfortunately we will miss it because it sold out almost 2 months ago and it doesn't take place until after we leave. The video is really good, but I am going ot try to exchange it because it seems to be somewhat damaged. Sometime we will have to come back to see the Tattoo. It looks like a really amazing event.

We got an all day bus pass for £2 we could ride around as much as we liked in Edinburgh. Now there are several bus companies and if we had been more thoughtful, we should have chosen First because it also runs here in Glasgow and we might have been able to use the all day pass to get home the same night—but we aren't certain it would have been honored in any case. A side note, we later met some friends of our friend Franklin and they remarked that as good as the public transportation is, locals complain that there isn't a unified transportation system as there is on the continent so you can't take a bus to an underground, etc. Rather, each are separate and so a journey adds up sometimes. Still, transportation is so much better than it is back in the US.

We found the bus and after a short wait we were off to Craigmillar Castle. We rode the bus in a direction we hadn't been previously. Eventually a couple of locals realized we were looking for something and asked if we needed assistance. They told us to be patient that the bus would get us there shortly. Sure enough, a few miles up the road, the man said to get off at this stop and ask the people at the stop how to find the castle. There were a couple of women there, who had very think accents and were obviously not wealthy. We asked them where we would find Craigmillar Castle and they sort of just laughed. This didn't exactly give us comfort, nor was it helpful. On the apartment building other side of the road we saw a sign for “Craigmillar Court”. This was obviously a low-income housing project of some sort ironically named after a castle. There appeared to be something up on the hill that could be a castle so we headed on. In a block o so we saw an entrance to “Craigmillar Gardens” and we entered thinking it might get us to the castle, or at least closer to. We took a dirt road/hiking path to where it terminated at some kind of recycling plant. Now this was very odd indeed! We followed a path somewhat toward where we had come from, but up the hill for about half a mile. This couldn't have been the way we were intended to go, but we were determined to see the castle. Eventually we found Craigmillar Castle.

Like Dumbarton Castle, this is not one of the major spots to see. Even in its heyday this wasn't a major locale. As with most of the places we visited, the signage was good, although none of the castles or historical sites have included a brochure with the cost of admission.

Craigmillar is now somewhat in ruins. If we had such a thing, I would like to think it would be preserved, but there are so many more significant historical sites that there is only so much appreciation and attention a minor site like this gets. The castle had been remodeled a half a dozen times as its different owners chose. Even in the ruins, you can see doors and windows filled in with stone and relocations of kitchens three of four times. There was some precautions taken for safety but no where near as much as the threat of lawsuits would require in the US.

The Castle is treated almost as a local park would be in the US. We met some kids who were having a great time protecting this castle from all manor of dragons and dangerous knights.

Seeing castles in varied condition gives an interesting perspective into how they are built. For example, several Craigmillar bedrooms were outfitted with several “latrine closets”. These were plumbing free because they emptied right onto the wall of the castle. No doubt this, would be a security measure—who would scale this castle wall?

As we left we found our way to the bus the way we should have come in the first place. It turns out that the well-meaning person on the bus had told us to get off a stop or two early.

Next we went to the ticket office to get tickets for the Tom Jones concert which will be held at Edinburgh Castle right where the Tattoo is held. This should be a spectacular show next Friday. Next, we intended to go back to the National Gallery as we had only seen the ground floor and there are at least three more to see. However, it was getting late and we were tired again from all the walking. We had a drink and wanted around Rose Street which is a nice pedestrian path. Laurie found a ring she linked at a street vendor while I investigated an Internet cafe. Apparently the rate is variable based on how busy they are. When I popped in, it was like £1.50 for an hour. Along the way we saw some interesting things. There were a group of women celebrating a 40^th birthday . You have to see for yourself.

We continued enjoyed more of downtown for a bit , grabbed dinner, and waited for a bit waiting for a comedy show just down the corner from the train station.

The show was very interesting. The food in the club/bar seemed pretty good, although we didn't try it since we had already eaten. The comedians gave us a bit of a hard time for being American, but they gave some English a much worse time. In fact, the only comedian to touch upon current events was a gay American comedian from San Francisco. Unfortunately, we had to leave before the headliner finished his act because the last train was at 23:30. We made it home fine, although we had to take a cab because the bus service had terminated for the evening.