Saturday, July 23, 2011

UK Trip: Days 0, 1 & 2

We arrive in Inverness to find everyone in a bit of a tizzy. Inverness is playing host to the Scottish Open golf tournament, except for the past two days it has been pouring rain and the golf has been canceled. This seems to affect everyone. Even our taxi driver was supposed to have been marshaling at the tourney but instead found himself behind the wheel like a regular work day. Mrs. McRae, at whose B&B we stayed, reported in her Scottish  brogue that there'd even been a thunderrrrstorrrrm, with forrrrrked  lightening. As a DC area resident I thought nothing of this until I learned that thunderstorms are rare in the cool, high latitudes of the Scottish Highlands.

After hearing The McRae's rather long list of rules (don't bump your suitcase up the stairs; no carryout food on the premises; don't leave the bathroom light on all night the way those Portugese people did the other week as the fan noise bothers the other guests, you must pay cash as  credit card machine is broken, ...) Ted and I headed out into town  through lingering rain showers in search of dinner. Ted is an excellent traveling companion but an extremely picky eater, which can complicate the process of finding food on trips. In this case he was willing to go to a pub (one recommended by our taxi driver) because the menu included burgers. I had fish and chips washed down with a pint. Our first pub dinner was nice enough but the real fun began after dinner when we took a stroll through town. I should mention here that Ted is a big fan of Celtic music (I like it  too) and so our ears perked up at the sound of bagpipes. The source was a street performer and we hustled over and listened to a tune before noticing  another band up the street. We scurried over to hear them. And then we noticed dancers. Then a teen bagpipe band. Then little girls doing Highland dancers (with bagpipe accompaniment - no prerecorded music here!). Then a Celtic folk band.  Then an excellent young band made up of accordion, fiddle, pipes, and drum. And a whole pipe and drum corps in full Highland regalia. Mind you, these were just the street performers. There was music spilling out of the clubs as well: more folk music emanating from a coffeehouse, and a rock band with horns playing classic rock standards (they did a pretty mean  version of Tequila) at a bar. The whole shebang culminated with a march up to the grounds of Inverness Castle where all of the street performers we'd seen performed individually and together as the sun began to  set (at 11 PM - love those Northern latitude summers) over the River Ness. If this is what Saturday nights are like in Scotland, Ted was ready to tear up his Virginia college applications in favor of University of Edinburgh. Alas, we learned that this was not a typical Inverness Saturday night; rather, it was a special to-do arranged for the golf tournament. But no matter: we were all the happier to have stumbled into just the right night to be there. Finally, having been on the go for about 36 hours (DC to London to Inverness plus our evening out) we returned to White Lodge and crashed.

Saturday began with our introduction to the UK style of breakfast. I refer to "UK style" because apparently there's fierce and conflicting nationalistic pride at play in naming this meal. When on Day 3 our Scottish guide ordered a "full English  breakfast" from our Scottish innkeeper he got an animated (though tongue in cheek) talking to for not having referred to it as a "Highland  breakfast". My old boss, who hailed from Derry, used to call this same meal an "Irish breakfast." I’m betting that In Cardiff they call it a “Welsh breakfast”. Anyway, breakfast always includes a cold component consisting of cereal, yoghurt (sic - the English don't know how to spell in their own language) and fruit. Then there's the hot breakfast, with choices ranging from the delicious (Scottish salmon and eggs) to a dish so disgusting I can't believe so many countries are eager to lay claim to it. Yes, I refer here to the full Scottish/English/Irish/Welsh/Isle of Man breakfast, which comprises poached egg, sausage, ham and black pudding/blood sausage. And toast. Always lots of toast with everything. Mrs. McRae also served us some potato scones, which were more like the love child of Pupusas and potato latkes than any sort of scone I'd ever seen.

After breakfast we bid the McRaes goodbye (Mrs. McRae kept watch to make sure I didn't bump my suitcase down the stairs) and after a "wee" stop at McDonalds to use their Wifi we met up with the group at the Inverness railway station as planned. The group turned out to be small: two guides and six of us "on holiday." Other than we two Americans, the group was evenly divided between Scots and Brits. Our two guides were Ele, a 20-something British woman living in Scotland and Ali, a 24 year old Scottish guy. They arrived in a van towing a trailer of Easky 17 kayaks, a small but generally insignificant step down in my mind from the promised Capellas. The other group members included Alex, a  British professor of Scottish literature at Edinburgh, Annette, a  Scottish nurse practitioner, Kath, a Scot who was some sort of public  policy type, and Sue, an Englishwoman whose profession I didn't get -  she may have been retired.    Years of watching Monty Python and Harry Potter movies have given me the ability to understand much of British English, save for the real Britishisms (e.g., being "knackered" at the end of the day or calling cookies biscuits) but the Scots were another story. I'm sure that by the end of the trip the Scots all thought I was hard of  hearing or daft given how many times I asked them to repeat themselves  or just stared blankly when they asked me a question. Someone once said we are "two people divided by a common language" (this is one of those quotes variously attributed to Winston Churchill, Osar Wilde, and Shaw).  How right he was.

Inverness is pretty far up in the Scottish Highlands, but it was still a ways from there to the west coast lochs. It doesn't look far on the map, but the roads in rural Scotland aren't exactly superhighways. In fact, a lot of the distance we covered was on single lane roads and by that I don't mean single lane each way, I mean single lane. The roads are one lane with little bump outs big enough for one car every 10th of a mile or so (a.k.a. every 0.16 km). When two cars come towards each other one pulls into a bump out and lets the other go by. Since the roads are also winding and hilly sight distances are limited leading to frequent abrupt stops to avoid head-on collisions. There’s even the occasional need for one of the cars to back up down the road a piece if the cars don’t see each other until they’re past the bump-outs. When you're traveling in a van trailering a bunch of kayaks this gets even more interesting. We made it to our destination after what to me was a hairy ride.

Our paddle on the first day was something of a check-out. The guides started us out just paddling in circles around the put-in on the more protected, inner section of Loch Sunart. Once they had a feel for our abilities we went for more of a real paddle, in fact staying out longer than planned. This first outing introduced us to two other daily features of paddling the lochs: first, the fifteen foot tides, and second, the mandatory daily stop for tea. On this first day the tide was going out while we were on the water. In the time it took us to have our tea and biscuits fifteen feet (5 m) of dry land had appeared between my kayak and the water’s edge! 

After we got off the water we went to our lodging, the Ben View Hotel in Strontian. Since you no doubt already know that this town gave its name to the element Strontium, I will skip that history and go straight to a description of the inn itself. As you might have guessed, the hotel offers a nice view of various “bens”. If you don’t know what a ben is, I’ll explain by saying it’s a “corbett”. Still confused? These are only-in-Scotland terms for “Mountain Peak”. In particular, we had a nice view of Ben Resipole and Ben Garbhein. If I ever come into possession of a mountain in Scotland I'm going to name it Ben Franklin. Or maybe Ben Gurion.


The Ben View had a nice traditional inn feel to it. The owner was a very gregarious fellow - and a big Springsteen fan (he told me this since I was an American). After getting cleaned up the group met at the bar where Teddy, having turned eighteen (legal drinking age in the UK) that day, was determined to order a drink. Of course, he has no idea what he likes, but fortunately he was in the company of experts (i.e., Scots) who were all too helpful in suggesting drinks. Even the innkeeper got into the act, pouring Ted little tastes of everything they had on tap. Ted finally ordered a rum & coke, figuring it was sweet and was a logical first step for a habitual Coke drinker.



Photos: https://photos.google.com/album/AF1QipPHhaKhGpL6nY-nJhNDAX6NEGWo0R_BOkvsEZZY
Scotland Highlights: Days 1&2

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