Posts Tagged ‘Europe’
Wrapping up with wee little tales
The Scotland trip came and went. I did my first post vacation normal household laundry today – to me this act signifies business as usual. I have not much more to write. It was our first car touring vacation outside of California. We walked over 100 km. Skye offered the landscape of my dreams although I found myself missing the fog. The scotch didn’t disappoint. The coffee was a pleasant surprise. If there is a next time in Scotland, it will have to be the Hebridian islands.
I wanted to end with snippets of tales, in order of observation, those that didn’t want to be left behind in obscurity of a photo album. But before the start of the end, I need to pay my tribute to an Isle of Harris scotch (link) – it was the crispness of apples, the brininess of sea and smell of peat in a glass.
And now for the snippets …
Read the rest of this entry »Where a sheep poops, a daisy grows
They say that the Scottish landscape is dotted with sheep. And they are right. From Inverness, we had headed out to Uig in the Isle of Skye. Apparently, the tourism in Isle of Skye has skyrocketed. The culprit is modernization, the island got connected to the mainland by a bridge on A87 in 1995, replacing the ferry-only option. And who would blame the high rate of tourism. Isle of Skye with its perpetual fog laden craggy landscape looks otherwordly.
An ancient forest in Cairngorms National Park
The Romans called Scotland ‘Caledonia’ and Caledonian pine trees are the name for the native Scottish pine. Incidentally, I had first come across the word Caledonia in the Astrix and Obelix comic series. Caledonian pines do not look like Douglas firs. To experience the ancient Caledonian forests today, one has to visit the Cairngorms National Park. Here in Cairngorms, the forest is dominated by regenerated Scottish pine with a native understory of wild berries, juniper, heather and rowan.
Edinburgh jewel, Water of Leith walkway
So now we are a week into the Scotland vacation. Edinburgh proved to be a lovely place to babysit the jetlag. It was a bit windy at times, but not the kind that makes you hold on to your hat. It was drizzly but not the kind that soaks you. So we walked. We were staying at The Raeburn in Stockbridge. From there, we walked to museums. We walked to the Royal Mile. We walked the Royal Mile. We walked the Botanical Garden. We walked to dinner. We averaged 7 miles a day. The nicest of these were the Water of Leith walkways. It is like going into a tunnel from one point and emerging somewhere else. Except that the tunnel is a walkway by the river, it is green, only allowing humans and their dogs to walk. The river is clean enough to encourage a bird habitat – we saw herons and mallards. Houses abutted on the walkway. Restaurants too. There were sculptural points of interest.
Read the rest of this entry »Ready, steady and waiting to go
This one is not a competition unless one counts competing with other vacationers. But this is a bucket list trip. Soon we will be on a flight heading up towards Scotland. If all goes to plan, this is what happens.
We land in Edinburgh and stay four nights. We explore the city and work off the jetlag. During this period, we also get used to the shifts in weather, set aside work worries and get into the vacation mode. Then we hop on a rental car and start heading towards the Perthshire. We stop at Dunkeld and walk along river Tay. Our first night outside Edinburgh is spent in Pitlochry. Next day, we head up towards Inverness. But before we do, we have the option of checking out Pitlochry, or Kingussie. This is when you wish time would dilate and you could do both. But we prefer lingering. Inverness is a two night stay. And here too, we will have options – Cairngorms or Black Isle. We decided not to drive the breathtaking North Coast 500. From Inverness, we will head out to Uig in the Isle of Skye via Achnasheen and Plockton. We stay in Uig for three nights. In Skye I didn’t give ourselves options to leave the Trotternish Peninsula. After Uig, we catch a ferry to Fort Williams and here again we stay two nights to explore the Glencoe region before heading out to Callander. Along the way, we will find ourselves on the edge of the Rannoch moor. From Callander we head back to Edinburgh for our flight back. Our final sight seeing will be the Doune castle where a reenactment of Monty Python and the Holy Grail “Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!” may occur.
I realized that my utter fascination for the Scottish landscape comes from reading and watching Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, hundreds of times. Conan Doyle grew up in Edinburgh. The story of the Hound of Baskerville is set in Dartmoor, but when Doyle describes the desolate hills, thick rolling banks of fog, and craggy rocks, I think of Scotland Highlands.
California is five times the size of Scotland. Yet, for such a tiny little place, this trip has been exceptionally challenging to plan. I have been trying for several years now. Any which way you look in Scotland, there are breathtaking mountains and lakes, charming villages, and fantastic food. Everything is must do. Everything is top 10. I first started with reading travel books. Then I hoped that AI would come to rescue. Finally, I had to call up a travel planner, Nordic Visitor, to rescue me. They have taken good care of us, have booked us in adorable B&Bs, kept our city to city travels short, given us time to breathe in-between. We drive a lot more in California on a weekend trip than we would drive on this ten day trip.
Yet, I am anxious. All of Scotland has thunderstorm, rain and wind in common. The mountains are often fog laden. This time of the year is also peak midge season – they swarm. If you aren’t careful, they will suck your blood and leave the sites itchy. Then there are many places that are the exceedingly touristy – I hear of the crowd being described as “gridlock” and “infrastructure failure”. I am a morning person, but I don’t like to head over to the car park first thing in the morning. I can’t share nature with noisy crowds. On the Antarctic trip, I was surrounded by chirpy humans, chirpier than the penguins. My movements were also circumscribed due to the fragility of the environment. I couldn’t get away to find a moment of quiet, I couldn’t listen to the nature undisturbed by the humans even for a single minute. I had felt extremely annoyed.
So, wish me luck this time and more importantly, wish me grace.
Locomotoring 