Day 6: Scotland vacation 2007

We got up and were able to have a proper look at the B & B.



It was formerly the home of Alastair MacLean, who wrote the novel The Guns of Navarone, which was also made into a movie with Gregory Peck and Anthony Quinn.

In addition to renting out rooms, they raise poultry. They even have a goose, of the non-edible variety (ie, a pet).



After we downed another giant, hot breakfast, we hopped in the rental car and headed out into the Highlands. First stop: Culloden Battlefield. This is the location of the last major battle on British soil. Ever heard of Bonnie Prince Charlie? He and a few supporters thought he should be the kind of Scotland and England, but the English and quite a few other Scots thought otherwise (he was Catholic), and this is where they fought it out. It was actually over in about 45 minutes, with most of Charlie’s forces slaughtered and Charlie himself on the run.

Here Hannah reenacts the command to charge.


At the next stop, we were dumb and left our camera in the car, which in turn means that I am dumb and forgot to mention in the earlier draft of this post our visit to Cawdor Castle, which was totally wonderful. We couldn't have taken photos inside anyway, but the grounds were beautiful, and I am glad I picked up the full guide with photos since I wasn't able to take any of my own. The house itself is the actual home of the Earl of Cawdor during the off-season; it felt weird walking through rooms that real people live in. Of course, I wouldn't mind being one of those people--the rooms looked comfortable and interesting, not just opulent like some of the places we've visited. The signs for the rooms were often hilarious, and I found out in the gift shop that they were actually written by the 6th Earl of Cawdor himself. An excerpt from "The Modern Kitchen": "This was once a dark and dreary place known as the School Room and may have been responsible for turning some of the Campbell ladies into confirmed spinsters and professional invalids." *hee!*

While planning the trip, John promised to find something that Hannah would find fun. So after the battlefield (what kid doesn’t like a battlefield?), we headed to Carrbridge and the Landmark Forest Theme Park. (I don’t know the purpose of all the extra dots on the letters on their written materials, but it is very annoying.) We had a nice time, but Hannah was in a bit of a snit because it turned out that the two things she wanted to do—the Ropeworx and the Skydive—required you to be 1.5 meters tall to do them. I don’t really blame her, since she had been looking forward to them. But we rode the water slide with her, all three slides.



And then she was made queen of the forest (at least in her mind).



The park is set in a forest, and John spent his time grazing the blueberries and cowberries there. It didn’t seem to worry him that people brought their dogs there, and that dogs occasionally need to pee, and that they seem to prefer bushes... It was kind of a game, harassing him about it.

Hannah didn’t want to try sawing wood, and she was too unhappy about not being able to climb on the rope things, so we spent a lot of time on the Tree Top Trail, a wooden, elevated trail through one corner of the woods. We only saw one squirrel up there, but then when we got to the feeding area, we saw several. Look at the red eye—evil, I tell you!



On the way out of town, John stopped to take some photos of the Old Bridge of Carr (hence the town’s name, Carrbridge).



To round out the day, we drove into Inverness. John was the trip researcher, and he hadn’t found out anything that made him want to invest a lot of our time in Inverness, so we bought a few groceries and ate a quick picnic dinner next to the River Ness. Hannah entertained herself flinging crumbs to some enormous seagulls until we were ready to take a stroll along the River.



John thinks that a day of vacation in which we aren't on the move from 8 am to 10 pm is a day wasted. Hannah and I are firm believers in relaxation being a part, however small, of the vacation experience, so when it gets dark, we retire to the safety and comfort of our hotel room. On this evening, John decided to find the River Nairn. In the dark. Alone. When he got back about an hour later, we found 2 ticks on him. Hannah named them Andy and Susan. We didn't have any alcohol or tweezers, so John pulled them out as best he could, then we daubed some of Hannah's purple nail polish on the spots. It works for chiggers... As far as I have been able to find out, Scottish ticks don't seem to carry any really nasty diseases, but that doesn't mean I wasn't a tad pissed at him for wading through shoulder-high weeds in the dark in a strange place near a river. grrr...

Day 5: Scotland vacation 2007

John had reserved a rental car and wanted to pick it up as early as possible, so we hustled Hannah out of bed early early and down to breakfast. John got the hot breakfast every morning we were in Edinburgh (actually, every morning but the last one of our vacation), but I often couldn’t stomach so much food first thing in the morning, so I would have cold cereal. Now, I know that in the UK, they have a slightly different way of putting things, but I was totally cracked up by the packaging for Crunchy Nut cereal: “...it’s ludicrously tasty!”

We finished breakfast, drug our stuff downstairs, checked out, and hopped on the bus. There we sat in the back row amid a big pile of suitcases and wet umbrellas (it was raining), and Hannah started to look decidedly green around the gills. I was just able to grab a plastic bag out of a side pocket on my suitcase when she started blowing chunks. Fortunately, it all went in the bag and on her hand, but I also had water and tissues, so we got her calmed down and cleaned up before we ever hit Edinburgh proper.

We hadn’t been on the bus we needed to take to the rental agency before, so we weren’t sure how far to go, but super-Mom to the rescue again—I saw the name of the street we needed and we were able to hop off and backtrack a little. We found the rental agency, and it was full of unhappy campers. One guy was supposed to get a van delivered to him the night before, to use while his work van was in the shop, and he was fairly pissed to have to put all his tools back in the malfunctioning van and drive down to their office that morning. But I think part of the office’s problem was that not everyone had a reservation like us (we went through the paperwork pretty quickly), and in addition, some of them didn’t speak English well enough to handle such a transaction.

Anyhoo, badmouthing of the agency aside, John learned to drive from the right side of the car on the left side of the road via the sink or swim method, and he did great! The car was the English version of our very own Roswitha (an Opel Astra), so the controls were familiar, but the windshield wipers went backwards (right to left instead of left to right), which made sense, because the driver is on the right. Other small things freaked me out at first, like the No U-Turn sign that was “backwards”:



John wanted to name our temporary wheels "Senior Car", but Hannah wanted "Jerry", so they compromised with "Senior Jerry." He was a good little car.

John had insisted that there was a weird dog-food smell in Edinburgh, and he especially noticed it in the car while we were still in Edinburgh. Just the other day, after feeding the cats, he commented, "Smells like Edinburgh." So if you ever find yourself thinking of Edinburgh and cat food in the same breath, know you are not alone.

It continued to rain as we headed north into the Highlands, so it was hard to see the scenery that a guy waiting for a van at the rental agency had promised was beautiful. When we got to Perth, we turned off to visit Scone Palace, where Scottish kings were once crowned.



John had a (wet) seat on the Stone of Destiny, but he says he didn’t feel any different afterward (except wetter).



We ate inside the Palace itself, in a cozy little bistro that made a mean tomato soup, and then we let Hannah play on the Adventure Playground to work off some excess energy.



But we wouldn’t let her chase the peacock.



Nor the white one in the parking lot that she called "Turkey!".



We didn’t go into the Palace itself, but we went all through the lovely grounds. We even tried out the hedge maze.



After that we headed to our B & B outside of Inverness, the Torguish House. I think we were in the Graham Room. They had it decorated in “Farm Chic”, but their web site doesn’t show the last little detail, the “farm” toilet seat.

Day 4: Scotland vacation 2007

We started the day on the east end of the Royal Mile at Holyrood Palace, the Queen’s official residence in Scotland. We didn’t actually go into the palace, because it was muy expensive and we were saving up our castle viewing for that day for the Edinburgh Castle.



Holyrood is right across the road from the Scottish Parliament, and that is one weird-looking government building. This side is funky enough, but the other side is covered in bamboo (from the cover of which a pigeon crapped on John, poor baby).



Our main reason for being down that way, though, was to go to the Our Dynamic Earth museum, which we didn’t get photos of because it was raining when we got there. It was really cool, and I would highly recommend it to anyone with kids or without. The beginning was a little cheesy, with a trip through time to show how the earth was formed and different geological processes, like volcanic eruptions and glaciation, but the exhibits you go through at your own pace were very interesting. There were lots of hands-on exhibits and video clips, so Hannah wasn’t overly bored. My favorite was a clip that showed how mammals differentiated into different species (albeit in a very, VERY simplified way). A group of rat-like mammals split up into smaller groups. One group climbed a tree and tried, one at a time, to reach some fruit at the end of a branch; the first two fell to a gruesome, splatty death, but the third sprouted wings and became a bat. The second group tried to catch some fish, but the first rat drowned (glug!), the second developed into something a little bigger and seal-like, but drowned anyway, and the third developed into a dolphin and happily snagged the fish. The third group went to some grasslands. The first rat ate some grass, barfed, and croaked; the second developed into a bigger animal, ate some grass, barfed, and croaked; the third developed into a horse and munched away at the grass. I found it highly entertaining, but then again, rats that go splat!, gurgle!, and barf! are funny, right?

If you go across a road on the east side of Holyrood and Our Dynamic Earth, you are at the Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat. This is how it looks as you drive into Edinburgh from the south:



The Crags are on the left, and Arthur’s Seat on the right. From Holyrood, you see the top of Arthur’s Seat over the Crags, so we didn’t realize at first that it wasn’t one formation. We headed up the west side of the Crags, along with quite a few other visitors. Hannah wanted to climb right over the top, and even John, the intrepid explorer, was starting to get nervous on that account. Here she is taking a break about 10 feet above the path we were on:



Here she’s planning to have a picnic lunch:



Before we made it around to the south side of the Crags, we got a glimpse of the Firth of Forth (the mouth of the river Forth) in the distance:



When we got to the east side of the Crags, we were still a grueling climb away from the top of Arthur’s Seat, a climb we decided to pass on.



After that we headed back up the Royal Mile, with a quick stop in the tiny Museum of Edinburgh.



I believe a large part of the center of Edinburgh is Georgian. Here’s a pretty example from the corner of Cockburn and the Royal Mile (whatever it is called at that point):



The Royal Mile stretches between Holyrood on the east end and the Castle on the west end, so we managed to walk the entire stretch of it on day 4. We spent about an hour-and-a-half looking around the castle; we saw the Scottish crown jewels and the Stone of Destiny, and some other interesting exhibits about Scotland’s royal history. I really have to recommend the audio tour if you have a kid with you; it kept Hannah from getting too bored while I read the same info at each display.

I really liked this plaque; those golden unicorns seem to be thinking, “Hey! What you lookin’ at?!”



Afterwards we went a ways back down the Royal Mile looking for entertainment and food.



After chowing down some Indian food (John thought it would be our last chance before we got to the Highlands, but every other restaurant in Inverness was a curry take-away *g*), we wandered among the Fringe Festival street shows. We saw one act of a couple in chicken suits, and another contortionist, this one better than the last: he stuffed himself through a squash racket, a tennis racket, and a toilet seat, all at the same time. Here he’s getting ready to juggle some knives while balancing on a pole.



At some point we went into St. Gile’s, but maybe it was on day 3. It’s a gorgeous church, and I kind of wish we had had more time to look around there.



As we walked around Edinburgh (and my pedometer said we had walked 6.85 miles in two days), I noticed that there weren’t really any pigeons, but seagulls everywhere. You could see them swooping overhead and hear them calling. Edinburgh is right on the east coast, so that shouldn’t be surprising, but it made Edinburgh stand out for me.

Also, if you are planning on going there, take a warm jacket. I had my winter coat with the lining zipped out of it, and I wished on a couple of occasions that I had brought the lining, too. “August” does not necessarily equal “warm” in Northern Europe, although we tend to forget that.

And now on to the highlight of the day, the Edinburgh Military Tattoo on the grounds of the castle. Several different military bands performed. We heard lots of bagpipes and drums from the Scottish regiments, but there were performers from all over the place:
The Taipei First Girls’ Senior High School Honour Guard and Drum Corps was an all-girl marching band, with flags and rifles.
Middlesex County Volunteer Fifes and Drums was an American group from Massachusetts who wore uniforms like from the American Revolution, complete with tri-cornered hat and powdered wigs.
The band of the Moscow Military Conservatoire had the crowd eating out of their hands. Scots are known for their humor, and that was true of everyone we met, but these Russians took the cake.
The Mounted Band of the Blues and Royals played from horseback. I don’t think I could manage to play clarinet and steer a horse; marching and playing was hard enough!
There was a big group of Highland dancers from Scotland, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Australia, and a team of mini-BMX stunt riders from about 10-16 years old.
My favorite was the Trinidad and Tobago Defence Force Steel Orchestra, a military steel drum band. I know that military bands play at special occasions, but I thought that certain instruments (like bagpipes and trumpets and drums) were formerly used in battle for announcing charges and such. It’s hard to imagine attacking the enemy to the sound of steel drums. I guess you could lull them into limbo-ing and then give them the chop when they least expect it...

Our photos all came out blurry, but here is the finale, only semi-blurry: