Interlude - Scotland

is booking a bus tour with a company called Haggis just asking for trouble?

rain, rain, sun, rain, rain, rain

I don't think I have enough to say about the rest of the bus tour to merit more than one page. That might change when I go through my pictures and pull out more to add to the photo album. But who knows when I'll get around to that.

If you've read the whisky story, you'll have some idea why I went on a bus tour of Scotland. If not, go read it. Or at least the first paragraph. It was a six day tour and there were 15 of us, of which one-third were Canadian and one-third were Australian. The guide was, of course, a true Scotsman. And I very quickly discovered that he was full of... umm... baloney. That was alright, though - I know some of the stuff he told us was true, and the rest was entertaining. 

On the first day, we headed out from Edinburgh, with our final destination Oban. The first stop was at the Wallace monument, where we were told that the braveheart story had nothing to do with William Wallace. I think that was one of the things that we were supposed to remember, if we remembered nothing else from the trip. There were two or three others - I think that kilts were an English invention and bagpipes were war instruments, but I'm pretty sure there was something else. Obviously, I haven't succeeded in remembering very well - so I guess I'll just have to go back, right? The other notable stopping points were to see Rob Roy's grave, and to visit a hieland coo named Hamish. We stopped at other places, but I don't feel like listing them all. Oh, and did I mention that it was overcast and/or raining all day?

Day two. More rain. After we got off the bus for a wee bit of exercise near Glen Nevis, that is. My notes from then: "It was a lovely walk, not too much rough ground - just up and down rocks, over mini-waterfalls, and sometimes through merrily bubbling creeks." (I'm even sarcastic when I'm writing to myself!) Walking through creeks was alright, though - my shoes were so completely soaking wet from the rain that I didn't even notice. Naturally, what with all the rain, the windshield wipers decided to stop working. That threw us off schedule, so that we didn't reach Eilean Donan castle until after it had closed, but nobody really felt like walking through it anyway. So we just took a few pictures and were on our way again. I started to turn one of my pictures into a watercolour but painting isn't my preferred medium so it's still far from finished. Maybe I'll bring it back here after Christmas...

After a quiet night in a small village on the Isle of Skye, we had a day of miracle weather. The sun was actually shining! Unfortunately, since it took longer than expected to get the wipers fixed, we got a bit of a late start, and spent a fair bit of the day on the bus. We did make a stop so that we could all dip our faces in the Sligachan River, so that we'd all be beautiful, and hiked a bit in the Quiraing (where we took a group picture), and had an hour in Portree to shop.

We left the Isle of Skye on the morning of day four, and also left behind the miracle weather (the other two types of weather in Scotland are atmospheric and dramatic). So I was rather glad to spend most of the day on the bus. Rain is all well and good, but one gets tired of walking in the it. One of our stops was at Corrieshalloch Gorge. You can get a fantastic view of the gorge from a footbridge. This bridge looks solid enough, but it is a light suspension bridge and has a tendency to sway when people walk along it. Which is very dizzyfying if you happen to be looking down. We spent that night in the allegedly haunted Carbisdale Castle. I will refer you again to the whisky story. Since none of us had any supernatural experiences, what was notable about the castle was that there wasn't anyplace nearby where we could buy dinner. So instead, we all threw some money into a hat and had a communal dinner. The last part of the drive was spent in competition to see who would be cooking and who would be cleaning up. The initial rounds tested the knowledge we had supposedly acquired over the previous days, but I strongly suspect it was rigged because neither team was a clear winner until the final round - the classic toothpick-and-lifesaver game. With the added twist that we were on a moving bus. Great fun, but we did miss a fair bit of the scenery.

Day five started with a trip to the beach. The weather wasn't quite right for that - overcast and a bit chilly, but at least it was raining. I think that more or less held off until we were walking around Culloden Moor. Very sad story, that. Maybe not very significant numbers-wise, but the defeat of the clans had a significant impact on life in Scotland thereafter. An equally significant site, to me at least, was the nearby Balnuaran of Clava (Bronze Age chamber tomb cairns). And the day was rounded out with a boat tour on Loch Ness, during which most of us became convinced of the existence of not only one but a whole family of "monsters". I'm not sure I believe anymore - the guy talked a good talk, but I need to see real proof. And the shape that the boat's sensors supposedly detected doesn't really hold up against all the studies that have debunked the legend.

Most people stayed up late on our last night, so I was the only one who managed to stay awake the next morning. The rest of them all missed some very pretty scenery. But they did wake up for one last wee little walk. All the way around a (small) loch.And I don't think it rained, at least not noticeably, and then the sun came out. There were brief stops in Dunkeld and Queensferry, and then we were back in Edinburgh. That night I had a room all to myself, a nice change after sharing a room with up to nine other women on the previous five nights. I ran into two of them when I went out for a wander, which spared me from a lonely dinner. But that's pretty much the last I've seen of any of them. Oh well. So ends the Haggis tour.