Not so Easy Jet

This was one of our tougher days. Even though the hotel was less than half a mile to the airport main entrance, we still took a cab as we had bulky luggage and John has medical conditions. The drop off point, however, was still not exactly close to the airport departure area. I wondered what somebody with more challenges than John would have done. Nevertheless, we made it to the airport in what seemed to be more than enough time. I felt like things were going smoothly. We picked up our boarding pass and deposited our luggage. We then went to the office of "special assistance" so that John could have help getting through security and to the gate. We waited there. And we waited there. And we waited some more. Almost nobody spoke to us, and when we finally managed to get someone's attention, he seemed to suggest that we should have come earlier if we needed help. But a young man finally came with a wheelchair and efficiently moved us through security. He was great and I tipped him generously. 

As it turned out, we had plenty of time as the plane was delayed by close to an hour. EasyJet is often called "Squeezy Jet" in the UK as they shove as many people as possible on each plane. If you have ever flown Frontier or Jet Blue, you have the basic idea. Poor John was crammed into a tiny seat with his knees somewhere around his navel. Despite being so uncomfortable, he somehow managed to fall asleep. 

He woke up just before we landed at Gatwick. There was a man waiting there with a wheelchair to help him, and he took John down to baggage claim. While we were waiting for our bags - a process that took over thirty minutes - John discovered that his phone was missing. We immediately figured out that John must have dropped it as he was exiting the plane. We also knew that we had exited from the secure area of the airport and that there was no way we could go back to get it. I figured we had lost it forever.

It took almost 45 minutes for the baggage to arrive. We went over to the EasyJet check-in desk to ask about lost and found. The people there seem befuddled by the question as if nobody had ever left anything on a plane before. One woman made a couple of phone calls, and then told us that yes, a phone had been found on our plane. We asked where and when we could pick it up. She was not sure, but told us to wait in the assistance area and it would be delivered there. 

So we went there and waited. And waited. And waited some more. I finally told John I was going to go back to EasyJet and ask again. I had the same confused expressions from several of the people at the desk there until one woman, apparently a supervisor, seemed almost embarrassed by the situation and decided to get involved. She made a couple phone calls and asked a guy named Gavin to come and deliver the phone to her. It took about a half hour more, but I finally had the phone in my hand. John was so relieved when he saw it!

But by this time we had spent at least an extra three hours in Gatwick. And by the time we caught the train to Victoria Station and a cab from the station to the little studio apartment I had rented for us in Leicester Square, it was late afternoon and we were both exhausted by the ordeal. So we just decided to skip even attempting to go to a play today and we just went out for dinner in Soho. 

As usual, London's Chinatown was crowded and festive.

We had dinner at a good Vietnamese restaurant and then strolled back to get a good sleep. We will be proper tourists tomorrow.

St Andrews

We spent last night at Rufflets, a small hotel outside of Saint Andrews much beloved of professional golfers who come to play at the famous "Old Course" in the city. It's house in an old mansion just outside of town. 

Our room is in one of the two towers. If you look carefully at the picture, you can see John in the window. 

The interior of the hotel, where I should have taken more pictures, was perfect. But the grounds definitely showed the effects of the summer drought. The grass had turned brown and many of the perennials looked like they should be on horticultural life support. But the overall layout in different rooms, separated by walls or hedges, was still rather elegant. 

After we had breakfast and checked out, we headed into Saint Andrews. As the guidebooks had warned, it was not easy to find a parking place. But after driving around a couple times I finally scored a spot and we set off to explore the old town on foot. It is a charming old university city, even on a cold gray day. As usual, John was better prepared for the weather than I was. 

Our first stop was the remains of the old cathedral. While in some places in Scotland churches and abbeys were spared the vicious iconoclasm of John Knox and the Scottish Reformation, the great cathedral, the largest in Scotland, was sacked and burned by a mob and then allowed to completely fall into ruin. Very little is left now except a few walls. 

Most of the stones of the building were taken away and reused as building material around the town. The empty site was then used as a graveyard. 

Most of the graves date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Many of the people commemorated died quite young, and the graves are filled with lachrymose sentiments about the shortness of life and the hope of a better one in heaven. But There was one more modern one I found with a distinctly secular theme. 

John and I left the cathedral to explore some of the campus of the university. Saint Andrews is, I believe, the oldest of the Scottish universities and for a long time was its most prestigious. In recent years, though, many Scottish students have preferred the livelier atmosphere of Edinburgh or Glasgow, and Saint Andrews had to work hard to attract students. It quite effectively marketed itself to American kids who wanted to have the experience of being at a British university. And then after Prince William went to Saint Andrews and met Kate Middleton there, well suddenly admission to Saint Andrews became very selective indeed. 

John and I found a small museum devoted to the history of the of the university. We initially planned to just politely pretend to look at the exhibits so it was not too obvious we were really there to just use the bathroom. But we actually found the museum quite interesting and spent a fair amount of time there. Saint Andrews is famous for the red gowns that the undergraduates wear. This, it turns out, was initially about making sure that tavern keepers knew who was a student and would refuse to sell them alcohol. I rather doubt that was all that successful a strategy. 

From the roof of the museum you can look across the water towards the gold course, traditionally considered the place where golf was invented. It looked like just a flat, bare field to me. 

We walked back to the car. Along the way, we passed by Saint Salvator's College, the oldest of the residential colleges there. 

From Saint Andrews we drove about an hour to Edinburgh. We have an early plane tomorrow for London, so I decided we would just stay at the airport Hilton. It is hardly Rufflets, but all I want is to get to the airport on time tomorrow. I did not want to drive into Edinburgh, so I left the car at the hotel and we took an Uber into the city to have dinner. I picked an interesting restaurant from one of the guidebooks, and discovered after we had been dropped off that it had not survived the draconian Scottish COVID lockdowns. We took another Uber over to Princes Street. In the gardens there, we saw a lovely floral display to commemorate the Jubilee. 

Much less charming by far were the piles of trash everywhere. There is currently a garbage strike is Edinburgh and some other Scottish cities. The filth and stench in places were almost overwhelming. Even apart from that, I began to unfavorably compare Edinburgh to Glasgow. In Scotland's second city, it seemed like they had scrubbed every building of the layers of centuries of coal smoke. It glistened, at least in the nice sections where we were. But all the buildings in the historic center of Edinburgh were still coated with black soot which reinforced the sense of dirtiness. 

Anyhow, tomorrow we are off to London! 

Culloden

We rather liked the Palace Hotel even though it clearly needed a lot of work. But I have to say that it has won the award for the absolutely the worst breakfast I have ever had in the United Kingdom ... ever. And that includes many visits to these islands over the past forty years. Before we drove away, we had one sight which had been closed the day before, Inverness Cathedral. This was the first cathedral built in Great Britain since the Reformation. It belongs to the Scottish Episcopal Church.

The interior is not really all the grand. There are dozens of larger and more impressive churches in New York or Chicago. 

Really, the only interesting thing in there were these little knit mouse dolls scattered in points around the cathedral designed, I guess, to make the building more interesting and accessible to children. And they were a fun touch. Here was the mouse bishop on the bishop's chair. 

And here were the mice presenting little mice for baptism. John wondered if Mr. Mouse wondered why one of his kids looked a little different. But no, these are Scottish Episcopalians and I am sure Mrs. Mouse did nothing unrespectable with the plumber. 

After we left town, we stopped for a bit in a shopping center where John picked up some socks and stuff like that. Then we went off towards Culloden Moor, the site of the brutal defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Highland clans who supported him. 

I have been interested in the Battle of Culloden ever since I was a kid. I was in seventh or eighth grade in Ohio and our local library showed films on Friday afternoons. My friends and I usually stopped by on our way home. One of the few I remember was Peter Watkin's 1964 documentary recreation of the battle. So when I figured out that our Highland Drive was going to take us by the battlefield, I knew we had to stop there. 

It was a gray cold day and that made the battlefield even more melancholy. 

We had a great guide who walked us around the field explaining the background of the conflict, the movement of the troops, and the course of the fighting. The actual fighting began when the Jacobites, that is the supporters of Charlie, fired a canon shot that landed on the roof of this cottage. 

The highlanders were no match for the better trained and armed government troops. Notice I wrote "government troops" here and not "English." In fact, Scottish loyalties were badly divided and many of the soldiers who fought against the Jacobite and in support of King George II were also Scots. In less than an hour, the royal forces had decisively won. Hundreds of the highlanders died on the field, and there was absolutely no mercy shown to any of the survivors or their supporters. 

A century later, a Scot placed these grave markers on the field. But, as our guide pointed out, these in no sense actually mark real mass graves. But they do commemorate the clans who actually participated and died. 

Just as we were leaving the battle site, my eye caught sight of this one. I almost stopped breathing when I saw it. 

This man was one of my ancestors and he died here at Culloden. And perhaps that set in motion events that would later lead to my great grandfather emigrating to Canada. 

It was a long drive from Culloden to St. Andrews. We are staying at a really fabulous hotel here, one of my big splurges of the trip. I will show some pictures in tomorrow's post. For today, I am content to leave it on the more somber note. 

 

Loch Ness and Inverness

We left Glencoe fairly early after having a uninspiring breakfast at the bed and breakfast. The checkout time was officially at ten o'clock, but our landlady was knocking on the door at ten minutes before that telling us that she needed to clean the room. I had no desire to stay longer. 

From Glencoe we headed northeast along what is known as the Great Glen of Scotland. The valley is one of those places on earth where it is easy to discern the cracks in the surface of the earth. The fault that underlies the sixty odd miles of the Glen, known as the Great Glen fault, splits the highlands in half with the Northwest Highlands on one side and the Grampian Mountains on the other. About two thirds of the fault is composed of a chain of lakes, Loch Ness being the largest and deepest. 

At the beginning of the 19th century, Scottish engineers constructed a canal to link these lakes to each other and to the sea on either side of the country. The Caledonian Canal, as it came to be called, allowed ships to not only save time when traveling from one side of Scotland to the other, but also to avoid the treacherous passage by the Orkney Islands at the tip of the highlands. 

We stopped at Fort Augustus where the Caledonian Canal meets Loch Ness. It's a cute little town, but it was absolutely overrun with tourists from every spot in the world. 

The reason for this popularity is not the canal, though it is picturesque enough.

No, this is all about "Nessie," the Loch Ness monster. People from around the world have all heard about Nessie and the locals run cruises on the lake where tourists hope that they will actually catch a shot of the elusive creature. So far, nobody has, of course. But while they wait for their boats they can buy Nessie souvenirs and eat Loch Ness themed snacks. 

After a short stop here, we continued on towards our stop for the evening, Inverness. This was a comparatively small town until completion of the Caledonian Canal when it suddenly became the second most important port on the North Sea. Most of the buildings in the city date from the Victorian period, perhaps most famously the fake castle on the hill behind John. 

We are staying at the Palace Hotel directly across the River Ness from the castle. You can identify it from the turrets in the picture below. 

It was a fairly cool afternoon, and John and I found a walking tour in one of our guide books. It started at the clock tower which still dominates the skyline. 

The city hall or "town house" is just across the street. It is a grand bit of Victoriana, isn't it?

There was a kid dressed in a kilt, playing a bagpipe, busking for tourist pounds. 

On the building across the street from the Town Hall, we discovered a couple tablets with various quotations from Scripture, all warning of immanent punishment for sinful behavior. 

The guidebook informed us that a disgruntled resident, unhappy that some of the city councilors drank, put these quotes up to warn them of the dangers of hell fire that awaited them as a result of their tippling. 

At the conclusion of our walking tour we came to the "Old Kirk", the only pre-Reformation church building in Inverness. The walking guide told us that after the route of the Jacobite forces at Culloden, soldiers who had somehow escaped death on the battlefield were summarily shot to death here. 

After having dinner at a Turkish restaurant, we walked home across the "Shaking Bridge," a nineteenth century pedestrian walkway. 

We took home a few leftovers from the restaurant. Back at the hotel, we had a particularly aggressive visitor who demanded a share of the food. 

 

Beauty and Blood

 It was a bright, beautiful cool morning when we woke up in Drymen. My weather app said it was a brisk 46 degrees, but when I considered how hot and dry things are in Southern Oregon, I felt very grateful to be in Scotland. We had breakfast and packed up. Before we left, we took pictures of our hotel

and the pub where we had had dinner last night. 

We then set forth to explore a little of the surrounding area. Drymen is at the edge of Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Park. Like Adirondack Park in New York, much of the land here is in private hands and there are farms and hamlets mixed in with the forest and lake areas. It is not a particularly dramatic landscape. When we ate last night at The Clachan, we talked with a young couple from Cumbria who had been up camping in the Trossachs. I asked her about her experience. "It's okay, I guess," she replied. "Not that much to see." Perhaps she was spoiled living so close to the Lake District and the Yorkshire Moors. I found the scenery quite enjoyable as we drove through it, though I certainly would not call any of it breathtaking. 

We detoured to see the most famous place in The Trossachs, Lake Katrine. Despite the prominence given to this loch in the travel literature, it is not easy to get there. I had to drive down and back a poorly paved single lane road. There were not enough places to pull over when I car came from the other direction and at one point I was afraid we would just get stuck there in a ditch at the side of the . Need I mention that there was NO cell service? 

Lake Katrine - there are different theories about why it is call a lake rather than a loch - is important for a couple reasons. Walter Scott traveled here in 1810 and was so taken by its wild, natural beauty that he wrote his narrative poem The Lady of the Lake here. I was taken with all the heather on the hilltops, but basically I was a little befuddled by how this body of water and the poem started tourism in the Highlands. 

But rather like Hetch Hetchy, others saw wasted water where Scott saw a mysterious spirit in the depths. So for the past 150 years Lake Katrine has also been the City of Glasgow's municipal water supply. Not everyone was thrilled with the change. When the first water came piped in from the Trossachs to the city, a Glaswegian, accustomed to the brownish well water, supposedly exclaimed, "It's got nae color, nae taste - it's nae good!"

We drove on. The scenery suddenly became extremely dramatic. 

This is both Scotland's most famous scenic area and the scene of its most famous massacre. It was here that the royal army, led by a Campbell, slaughtered men, women, and children of the MacDonald clan. Many of those who fled from the soldiers died in the winter snows in these mountains. For most Scots it is hard to separate the scenery from the savagery, no matter how bucolic it seems.  

Today is part of the August Bank Holiday weekend, so it was it was hard to get a place to stay. I did find a bed and breakfast just outside of Glencoe. It only has two rooms, and I immediately had the sense of staying with a maiden aunt. But it was located in a beautiful area. 

On Land Again

Today was the end of our cruise, and although I am excited to start our exploration of the Highlands and then to see our friends in England, I am sad to part with the friends we have made on this boat. The sights have been interesting, the scenery rather breathtaking, but the best part of the experience has been the people we met here. I will always remember Shirene

Roger and Sandra,

Annemarie and David,

and Marie.

After we disembarked, John and I took a taxi to Glasgow. We are renting a car and driving around the Highlands for five days. I made the reservation a while ago as I wanted to get an automatic. I figured driving on the left side was enough of a challenge without struggling to remember how to use a clutch. The only place it appeared that I could get one was at the Glasgow airport. But just as we were approaching the city I looked again at the confirmation email and double-checked with the driver to make sure that the location given was in fact the airport. "Nay," he responded in the thickest Glasgow accent I have yet to hear, "that's in the city center." We did manage to finally make it to the Budget car office and pick up our car. 

I managed to negotiate several hundred thousand roundabouts - okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration - and we were finally in the countryside. I only planned for us to do a short drive today, so we are spending the night in Drymen - pronounced something like "drim'n - in the Loch Lomond area. It's a very cute town, and we are staying at the Winnock Hotel there. 

The front section of the hotel, housing reception, the restaurant, and a few rooms, dates from the 18th century. We were dazzled by the lovely flowerboxes under the windows and the hanging baskets. 

We are staying in a new wing of the hotel carefully hidden in the back. It lacks some of the charm of the old section, but I do not really want 18th century plumbing, so I guess the modern part is probably better for accommodations.

We had dinner at The Clachan, which claims to be Scotland's oldest pub, established in 1734. It was everything you could want an old Scottish pub to be including a crowd of old guys at the bar who no doubt came every evening it was open. 

Tomorrow we are heading up to Glencoe. 

A Grand Castle and a Long Walk

We pulled out of Tobermory early in the morning and sailed down the Sound of Mull. It did not take us long to reach our first stop of the day Duart Castle. We all bordered the tender

and headed toward a small stone pier. 

John was snapping a picture of the castle itself, looming high above us on a bluff.

Were the scaffolding removed, it would have an even more Gothic feel to it. We started walking up the hill and along the way I was delighted to look at the wildflowers.

particularly this iconic one. 

It was a fair distance from the Sound to the castle. I suppose the MacLeans wanted some time to see incoming enemies and to put them at a disadvantage when they attacked. 

Still, the cannons outside the castle are a purely decorative touch from a much later period. 

Duart Castle and the MacLeans have a checkered history owing to their unflagging loyalty to the House of Stuart.  They prospered during the the reigns of James I and Charles I. They lost the castle and their lands during Cromwell's military government, but regained them with the Restoration. However, the MacLeans, like many Scots, refused to acknowledge William and Mary or the Hanoverians as their rightful rulers and were active in the Jacobite uprisings beginning in 1689 and ending in 1745 at Culloden. At that point, the MacLeans lost most of their ancestral lands for good and Duart Castle fell into ruin. 

In 1910, Sir Fitzroy MacLean, the clan having apparently finally made its peace with the monarchy, bought the castle and began to refurbish it into a residence. 

A few of the ancient features of the castle were kept, largely, I hope for amusing guests. At least that is why I think they still have the dungeon here. Right now, have some models of the Spanish sailors who were imprisoned here after bad weather ruined the Armada's chance of success. 

The living quarters on the second and third floors seem rather modest, despite the size of the building. There is a large living room

and a some not-all-that-grand bedrooms.

Despite the six-foot stone walls, I much preferred our room at the Hotel du Vin. As you might expect, there are portraits everywhere of the different leaders of the MacLeans.

The family has many ties to Lord Baden-Powell and the Boy Scout movement, so perhaps it is not a surprise that so many of these portraits have an outdoors theme to them. 

It was cold and windy on the roof of the castle, but it gave a great view of the area and passing ferries.

Back at the boat, Iggy gave us a suitable lunch for this trip, a Scotch Egg.

Ted moved the ship a little further down the coast and we moored on the other side of the Sound, that is, just off the mainland, in a very peaceful cove. This is our last night on the boat, and we will be heading back to Oban tomorrow. But we had one last excursion. 

In the tender, Ted took us out to see some wildlife. 

A seal seemed to be posing for us, though he was probably just too lazy to get into the water. We also saw a white-tailed eagle, Scotland's largest bird of prey. It was hard to get a good photograph here without having a special lens for my camera.

Just before we landed, we took a look at a mussel farm. I think a lot of the production here probably ends up in Europe. 

The hike was over three miles and it included a fairly big hill. John was a little nervous about this, but he did an amazing job. Even though he is still struggling with his up and down blood pressure, he has made good recovery from his heart surgery. 

The walk was pleasant, other than the ubiquitous midgies, though there was nothing particularly noticeable about the scenery. We saw lots of gurgling streams and rivers

and a few of the famous Highland Cattle.

Back at the ship, we had a lovely final supper together and started getting packed up to go. Most of our friends aboard will be returning home. John and I will start our driving tour of the Highlands. I hope I remember to drive on the left!