Exhausted in Edinburgh

The nearer we came to Edinburgh (that’s ED-in-bur-ruh) the more palpable our relief at soon being rid of our rental car. The little Fiat 500, Fifi, has been grand on these country roads, but the time was nigh to give it up. So much navigating and driving and getting lost has exhausted us to our cores, but at least we can still laugh about it. Each time we find ourselves circling somewhere we’ve already passed, I quote Jim Carrey in the Truman Show: “We’re on a loop! We just go round and round!” and Thayer responds by quoting Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s European Vacation: “Look, kids, it’s Big Ben!” I can’t tell you quite how many times we’ve had this exchange.

To reach the Budget Rent-a-Car return on the outskirts of Edinburgh, I frantically wielded three or four different maps, trying to reconcile them against each other, and I nearly wept with joy when we finally arrived. Sadly, this joy was to be short-lived.

While Thayer went inside to take care of business, I stayed outside and unpacked the car. I took it as a very bad sign when I finally went into the office and found him on the phone saying, “…but I’m looking at our paperwork and it says to return the car here.”

Our online Budget booking had directed us to this office for the return but, as we were horrified to discover, this office was a franchise that did not take corporate returns. There was “nothing anyone could do” but send us off to the car return at the airport, about a 20-minute drive away, and yet no one in the office could quite tell us how to get there. No truer words have been spoken than when Thayer, very calmly, explained to the Budget associate how desperately close to “losing it” we were. The memory of it makes me laugh now. It didn’t then.

[On the way to the airport]

Thayer: Two roundabouts here, are you kidding me?

Hayl: Nobody is kidding us, honey. Nobody.

Well, we made it to the airport, freed ourselves from the car, and took a bus to downtown Edinburgh. There we met up with Simon, who let us into his partner James’ Airbnb apartment, which we had all to ourselves for the next two nights. James joined Airbnb last year, thinking he would just stay with Simon when someone wanted to book his place, but interest in it was so high that he fully moved in with Simon and rents his place pretty much constantly. Rightfully so—the sleek one-bedroom apartment overlooking Edinburgh’s old rooftops and Arthur’s seat—the remains of an extinct volcano—is fantastic.

We spent the next day and a half exploring Edinburgh on foot and by hop-on/hop-off audio-tour bus, stopping into nearly every cheesy-wonderful Scotland tourist shop on the Royal Mile, touring Edinburgh Castle, gawking at the stunning St. Giles’ Cathedral, and visiting the National Museum of Scotland. There the highlight for us was viewing the taxidermied Dolly. Remember her? Dolly-the-sheep was the first ever animal to be cloned; born and raised in Scotland, she was, aye. And named for Dolly Parton, for she was cloned from cells from her mother’s udder.

[reading some information at the museum]

Hayl: I knew that already because I have a brains in my head.

Thayer: You do? You have a brains?

Alas, the exhaustion had finally reached our brainses. We dropped off our purchases at the apartment and then made our way to Grass Market, a narrow street running up a steep hill, its different colored storefronts contrasting adorably with each other. We spotted some people up above us on a terrace we hadn’t noticed before, so we climbed a staircase and enjoyed the view of the dimly lit old street from a story above it. Up there we enjoyed delicious Kurdish food at a patio table at Hanam’s before hoofing it home and collapsing into bed, grousing the whole way about our old, weary bones. We are not in our twenties anymore, that much is for certain.

In the morning, after not nearly enough time in Edinburgh, we quickly bustled ourselves and our luggage down the 60-step circular staircase and to the rail station about a mile away. A relaxing train ride to Glasgow and bus ride to the airport followed, and with a quick zip-zip over the pond, we landed again in Reykjavik.

Until next time!

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Fàilte gu Oban

Fàilte is the Scots Gaelic word for “welcome” and, having no idea of pronunciation, we’ve ungracefully been articulating it as FAIL with a “t” at the end. This has come in handy for every mistake and wrong turn we’ve made along the way. “Fàilte!” we shout and then laugh at each other. Lest ye make the same mistake, fàilte is pronounced “FALL-cha.”

We knew we must be nearing the end of our travels when we finished off our 12-pack of car crumpets. We’d purchased the crumpets over a week ago and had been eating them with peanut butter—basically a sacrilege—for makeshift car lunches. Kirsty-the-Irish-lass had informed us of our folly: everybody knows they must be toasted and covered in butter. I suppose we’ll have to save the proper crumpet experience for our next trip abroad.

On our way to Oban, we drove by the Glenfinnan railway bridge—the 21-arched bridge over which Harry Potter and his wizarding friends ride the magical Hogwarts Express. Everything begins with “Glen” in this region because glen means valley, and this terrain is covered with them. The next glen we hit was Glencoe, also known as “The Weeping Glen,” named so because of the 1692 Campbell/MacDonald showdown. The MacDonald clan chief was late in swearing his oath to the British monarch, and the local Campbells led the British Redcoats into the glen, where they were sheltered and fed by the MacDonalds for twelve days. On February 13, the soldiers were ordered to rise early and kill their hosts. The stunning glen still weeps with cliffside streams when it rains.

The nearer we got to the bustling town of Oban (that’s OH-bin), the more people we saw out and about, clad mostly in summer shorts and sandals. Now, we were just as stoked as the Scots about this seemingly endless warm sun, but let’s not forget that that this “warm” is upper 50s, Fahrenheit style. We were quite comfortable in our jeans, long sleeves, and North Face jackets. But that kid we passed on our way into town was quite comfortable in his swim trunks and bare feet, splashing in a kiddie pool.

[Passing a sign for A’Chonghail]

Hayl: The Gaelic sure needs a lot of letters to say “Connell.”
(Seriously, "Connell" is how you say A'Chonghail.)

After winding up very narrow one-lane hillside streets and getting thoroughly lost, we finally found and checked into The Old Manse Bed and Breakfast, where the windows overlooked the whole town and the tea tray contained a tiny glass-stoppered bottle of sherry. From there our first stop was the Oban Distillery. The late afternoon hour prevented us from going on the tour, but we were able to read some information about the brothers who founded the distillery in 1794 and the town that was built around it.

We grabbed a tasty dinner at Cuan Mor, Gaelic for “the ocean,” and then set out to find a pub and meet some locals. Enter Donald MacFarlane.

Donald was lugging an enormous duffel bag from pub to pub, as he had just returned from four weeks at sea—old hat to a 32-years fisherman, such as he was. Our American accents are a beacon in some of these towns, and Donald chimed in as soon as he heard us order our respective cider and whisky.

Two gents nearby were joking about fighting one another, and Donald informed us that bar fights were common, as any old thing might set a couple of inebriated Scots to fighting for their honor. “Like the clans,” I ventured. Donald stared at me in stunned silence until his face broke into a grin. “Like the clans!” he agreed, laughing.

We had heard (from Rick Steves) that “the ‘45”—that is, the 1745 campaign of Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scotland to retake the British throne—and the subsequent 1746 Battle of Culloden are still rather immediate to some Scots, and with Donald we learned that was true. He fired right up as he talked about it, this 250-year-old event. By the end, we learned that the MacFarlanes—his kin—and the MacGregors were the only two clans never to have surrendered to the British monarch. “Never have, never will,” he said, utterly solemn.

We shared stories about driving around our respective countries, and he told us of his youthful drive from Oban down to the south of England to see his then-girlfriend. The harrowing 120-mile-per-hour drive took him nine hours and, naturally, required him to hit “every bloody stop for bloody petrol!” We told him a drive of the same length might get him across one American state in some instances and he, horrified, declared that when he takes his wife traveling stateside in a few years, they will stick to exploring Utah on horseback. He really, really wants to see Utah.

Later he begged our forgiveness for “so rudely” having neglected to offer us his home to stay the night. We told him we’d already secured our lodging, but that we’d be sure to look him up the next time we visited Scotland. “And you will be truly welcome,” he replied, never breaking eye contact. The old clan hospitality is alive and well.

We awoke—a bit worse for the wear—early next morning and had our “full Scottish” breakfast, differing from the full English by the absence of beans and the presence of a potato pancake. After briefly chatting with the Old Manse host Simon about the similarities between Scotland and Seattle weather, we headed out on our last drive to our last stop in the UK: Edinburgh.

Until next time!

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The Highlands Part 2: Isle of Skye

From Dundreggan we made quick time west, stopping first at a ruined church and its surrounding cemetery that held many MacRaes, just because it was a beautiful day and ruined churches fascinate us.

We continued along Loch Duich until we reached Eilean Donan Castle (that’s EYE-lin or ELL-in DOE-nin), stopping to tour the inside, which was dressed from head to toe in MacRae clan tartan. Clearly they owned this region; in fact, a MacRae had purchased the castle ruins in the early 1900s and had it restored. Today the MacRaes still own it and use it for summer stays and clan gatherings. A giant portcullis raises and lowers the castle gate, but only in April when the MacRaes have their annual banquet. I had no trouble imagining them, dressed to the nines in their clan tartan, listening to bagpipes play as the gate opened to allow them inside for their ceilidh (read: big dance party).

On we drove to the Isle of Skye and found our next Airbnb: a “traditional croft house” with a white stucco exterior and slate roof, two one-window dormers on the second floor, a large garden out front, and a line of laundry billowing in the wind. Our sweet hostess Sarah welcomed us in and allowed us to use her kitchen to heat up some leftover pasta we’d saved for lunch. We ate at a picnic table in the yard and soaked up the unseasonably warm sun.

Not wanting to waste a moment of our one day on Skye, we hopped into the car and drove the loop around the Trotternish Peninsula, stopping to see rock formations like Kilt Rock, a cliff whose dried lava columns look like kilt pleats. Intoxicated by the weather—gusty wind with a bright, baking sun—we stopped frequently to hike around cliffs, falls, and beaches and breathe in a distinctly earthy Scotland smell.

About halfway around the peninsula loop, we stopped at the Ferry Inn for a mocha and a rest. There were two bartenders and three patrons including us, and the locals entertained us with amusing conversation about how it was the Sabbath and we were in a “heathen place.” Until recently, there’d been very strict expectations about not working on the Sabbath, so the deviation from this tradition is relatively new. It was wrong even to tidy your house on Sunday, but as the little gray-headed bartendress reasoned, “Would you really miss out on a day like today to hang out your laundry?”

Scots everywhere have been abuzz over the glorious weather, as were the English and likewise the Welsh over the sunny—though cooler—weather we’d experienced there. Warm days are not lost on us pale-faced Seattleites, and we consider ourselves fortunate to have been rained on only once so far. (Knock on wood.)

In the evening we had dinner next to a wood-burning fireplace at Cappuccino’s in Portree. You think you’re getting off easy with the pronunciation of Portree, but you’re wrong; it’s Por-TREE. Cappuccino’s served us up a mean sticky toffee pudding for dessert, and we thus discovered that “pudding” over here means “cake.”

After dinner we returned to ye auld croft house and cuddled up for an early bedtime, waking in the morning to have breakfast and chat with Sarah and her two other guests: a mother who was driving her college-aged son around Skye while he studied religion and its importance to small, close-knit communities. He might do well to visit the bartenders at the Ferry Inn. We went on to debate the merits of coffee versus tea in the mornings, with us firmly on the coffee side and him deeming our high-tech coffee makers silly and excessive. That is, until we told him about the machines you can program to grind your beans and brew your coffee by the time you wake up, which he sleepily pronounced “bloody brilliant.”

Instead of being sad about leaving, I prefer instead to focus on Skye as a place I know I will go again someday. It has become my favorite part of Scotland, easily and immediately. I can’t wait to see it again.

Until next time!

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The Highlands Part 1: Inverness

On our way to the Highlands, I decided I’d heard enough of the Scottish accent to begin trying to imitate it. As you may well know, accent imitation is something I love to do but rarely do in front of anyone because I get stage fright and my mouth freezes up, the resulting lilt like none found on this planet. A few stops ago, a glass or two of wine made me bold enough to show off my English and Irish accents to Kirsty-the-Irish-lass, but the Scottish burr was uncharted territory.

It’s safe to say my version of it was pretty terrible at the start, but I am getting the hang of it better than I’d thought I would. I like to practice it while I read our travel books.

[Reading aloud to Thayer about William Wallace, about three sentences in…]

Thayer: So it was Edward I who was in power at the time?

Hayl: I have no idea what I just read. I can’t do the accent and process information at the same time.

We soon stopped in Pitlochry (that’s Pit-LOCK-ry) and toured the Edradour (ED-ra-dower) whisky distillery—the smallest distillery in Scotland. Only about three people work it, producing in a year what the larger distilleries produce in a week. They pride themselves on using much of the same equipment as they’ve always used, only upgrading when they absolutely must. To hear our tour guide talk about their whiskies—his voice going soft and his eyes closing gently—you’d think perhaps they were his mistresses. The time, effort, and love put forth, from tapping the spring to bottling the spirit, indeed suggests a loving and giving relationship. Our guide poured us each a small dram and toasted a reverent Slàinte (SLON-juh, the Gaelic “cheers”).

From there we continued north to the general Inverness area and stopped to walk the battlefield of Culloden (Kuh-LAW-din), the site where in 1746 Bonnie Prince Charlie and many Highland clans (the Jacobites) fought against the English government for control of the throne, resulting in a horrific bloody massacre for the Scots and the end of clan life as they knew it. Thayer and I knew about the Battle of Culloden from reading the historical fiction Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon and were thankful to have that background as we walked the paths around the battlefield.

The field has been kept mostly as it was back then: boggy, hummocky, and barren save for long, matted-down yellow and green grasses. Memorial gravestones were erected in the late 1800s for each of the mass clan burial sites, and lines of red and blue flags show where the front lines of the government and the Jacobites stood, respectively. The eerie sadness cuts through, added to by the sinking late-afternoon sun, thick haze, smell of wood fires burning, and white noise of passing cars that can almost be taken for the echoes of battle chaos.

Just down the road are the Clava Cairns, hair-raising ancient burial sites from 3000 and 4000 years ago. Can you even process that? I have a really hard time with it. The cairns are made of stones stacked into a ring standing about six feet tall, with a long hallway-like entrance, also of stones. Once a cairn had been used for a burial, it was closed and surrounded by a circle of tall standing stones. This area, too, felt a bit ghostly, but we lightened the mood by acting out the scene in the Outlander series where the protagonist gets pulled back in time through the stones. If you look at our UK pictures on Facebook, you’ll recognize this part by the photo of my head and torso disappearing between a split stone while my legs splay out the side.

Twilight was falling by the time we headed through Inverness and south along the Loch Ness. Ness is big around here—there’s the city Inverness, or “mouth of the Ness,” the river Ness, and the lake Loch Ness. And of course, there’s Nessie, the fabled Loch Ness monster.

We only saw Nessie in plush huggable form inside the area’s many tourist shops, but I will say this for the Loch Ness. It is creepy. Driving alongside it in the near-dark, everything cast in a grey-blue glow and shrouded in mist, I was so thoroughly spooked that I needed to play some Robyn on the car stereo, hoping my Swedish songstress would soothe my frazzled nerves. A few minutes later…

[Hayley switches from Robyn to ABBA]

Hayl: Even Robyn isn’t doing the trick. I need the cheesiest sh*t imaginable to make me not terrified.

ABBA’s cheerful song stylings indeed made the freaky drive more fun, and we soon arrived at Graineag (GRAIN-aig) Bed and Breakfast in Dundreggan, where the chatty hostess Barbara was kind enough to call the closest restaurant to make sure they were still open for us to get dinner at the late hour of 8 p.m.

We raced to the Glen Moriston Arms in Invermoriston and enjoyed having dinner in the fancy restaurant decorated in clan tartan carpet, curtains, and seat cushions. It was there I enjoyed my first ever Kopparberg Pear Cider, the lightest, freshest, peariest cider I’ve ever tasted. It was Swedish, naturally—the third Swede to rescue me that night.

I continued to practice my Scottish burr and lamented the lame boringness of the American accent, to which Thayer wisely replied, “Sometimes you just have to live with your own mediocrity.” Life is full of hard truths.

The next morning over breakfast, Barbara explained the thin line of liking/loathing between the Scottish and the English. Many of her loved ones were English including—“unfortunately”—her husband, yet the Scottish would never and will never root for the English in any sporting match. No matter who they’re playing, the Scottish will root for the other team.

Barbara: It’s not that we don’t like England, we just never want them to win… anything!

As she went on to talk about the Highland region of Scotland, she interrupted herself to ask, “Have you read the Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon?” We were thrilled to learn that her father had spent his life working at the Fraser estate—the modern-day iteration of the Clan Fraser castle featured prominently in the books. Not only that, but she once went to a book signing and met Diana Gabaldon. Gabaldon was headed to a Clan Fraser gathering, and Barbara said to send her regards. Gabaldon then emailed Barbara—emailed her!—to tell her that her regards were warmly met and the Frasers fondly remembered her and her father. And that was our brush with a brush with fame in the Highlands.

After breakfast we drove to Cannich (KONN-ick) and hiked around Glen Affric, then drove back to Invermoriston and hiked around the falls that tumbled down either side of a giant sheer slab of rock. We tooled around the small town of Beauly before exploring more of Culloden, and then we found a scrumptious dinner at the Gathering Place, a Chinese restaurant in Inverness.

On our drive back to the B&B, I considered how all I’d ever read about Scotland’s landscape had called it “rugged.” Rugged, rugged, rugged until I was blue in the face. Quit with the rugged, I’d thought. Surely there’s another word to describe it. As we drove through England, I even wondered how the landscape of Scotland would be so different from what we were already seeing there. Well, guess what. It is different. And guess why. Because it’s rugged.

The next morning we packed up and had breakfast, this time sharing stories of our travels thus far with a young couple from Essex who were also on holiday. Then we hopped into the car and headed for the sky. The Isle of Skye, that is.

And with that, I leave you with a quote.

[While practicing the Scottish “aye,” said while inhaling sharply, like you’re gasping out a “hi!”]

Thayer: Except we look like we’re convulsing and they don’t.

Until next time!

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Fa’side Castle Forever

Up we drove, out of England and into Scotland, stopping just outside of Edinburgh at Fa’side Castle where we had reserved their tower suite for just one night. Neither our pocketbooks nor our brains could handle such lavish treatment for any longer than that. Just kidding; it was just the pocketbooks.

The lady of the castle, Sue Brash, met us as we ducked through the five-foot-tall arched stone doorway. She showed us up the narrow, circular castle staircase, the first five steps of which were original from the fourteenth century. The fourteenth century. In their extensive research, they found the first mention of the Fawside estate from 1124 A.D., the castle proper having been built a couple hundred years later. Since its construction, it changed hands several times, its ruins owned by the Fa’side Preservation Committee from 1968 until a couple bought it in 1976 and restored it. The Brash family purchased it in 1989. They’ve found upwards of thirteen different spellings, so they’ve decided on “Fa’side” to imply that there’s a choice.

Our first stop on the staircase was around third-floor level, where Sue opened a heavy arched wooden door with a big metal sliding lock. We “minded our heads” as we ducked through and found our sitting room. Adorned with leather furniture, lamps galore, ornately painted wood-beamed ceilings, a wood-burning stove, a piano, a stone chess set, a tartaned-off fourteenth-century loo, and even a jail, this room was the stuff of little girl fantasies. And it only got better from there.

Our bedroom was up another seven million or so castle stairs, the bed, chairs, dressers, and armoires plush and fancy. A plate of grapes sat on the dining table, and a set of China was just waiting for tea time. Even an antique telescope decorated one of the alcoves. Surely I could have been Queen Anne Boleyn reincarnated but, as Thayer so lovingly told me once during my Tudors-on-Showtime obsession, “You are my queen that I love and do not want to kill. You are my queen that I do not cut the head off of.” My hubs—he knows how to treat a lady.

We left the castle only briefly to grab some dinner in the nearby town of Musselburgh, but we hurried back to spend every waking hour soaking up castle life. We sat at our table and had tea in precious China cups, we lit a fire in the sitting room and curled up in chairs, reading as much as we could find about castles, William Wallace, and British and Scottish Royalty, and we had a bath in the enormous claw-foot bathtub. Bedtime finally rolled around, but I didn’t want to sleep, for that meant my time as a queen was up. As we lay in bed, I kept Thayer awake with a steady stream of “Hey, honey!” making him laugh until even I got too tired.

The next morning we woke up in our king-sized bed and had some leisurely morning tea. I took another bath—heck no, I was not going to let that mammoth thing go to waste—and we packed up and headed out, Thayer gallantly lugging our suitcase down the many, many, many castle stairs.

Before departing, we chatted with the Brash family and learned a bit about farming life in Scotland and its limitations on their travel ambitions. Perhaps real castle life was not for us after all. After both of their dogs claimed ownership of our rental car in the only way dogs can, we set off for Inverness.

Until next time!

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