We were on the road by 11 am at the least and it wasn’t long
before we had driven for a mile and then stopped. Yes, this was a trip with a
lot of stops. It was another great cemetery, This one for the McCrae Clan of
Dunvegan. These cemeteries are the most peaceful of places and beautiful locations
for photos. They seem to be in high places like at the top of a hill,
overlooking a large lake or valley. We spent over an hour there marveling over
the size of the stones and the engravings. These visits had changed my mind about cemeteries
in general, as I began to see that most of the stones were put there to
celebrate the life of the person that had gone before, more than saying “here’s
lies the body of somebody important”. Many of the stones even mentioned that
the marker was not in the same place as the remains. However, we were
frequently reminded by the locals that only the very rich got this sort of
treatment. One of the things mentioned by the English who considered the Scots
barbarians when they first encountered the Scottish culture, was their ritual of using a
coffin with a hinged bottom, just dumping the body into the ground at a
funeral, so they could reuse the coffin for someone else.
The tour of Dunvegan castle was quite different. This castle
had been continuously lived in for 800 years! This one had been remodeled
several times and still was used as a summer home by the owner, in addition to
being a local attraction. The exterior looked just like you would expect from a
castle sitting on the edge of a lake, not as large as you would think. The
inside seemed more like what you see in the show Downton Abbey. They had
tour guides stationed inside and they told you all about the furniture, and the
memorabilia. There were huge paintings everywhere, individual portraits of family
members over the years, and my first thought, some artist made a lifetime job
of painting their portraits. One of our tour guides was this tiny old lady
that told us about how the whole house was run by a single maid that had been
there since she was 16 years old. She was now 76 and still nobody could keep up
with her. She regaled us with stories about how young people just don't have the work ethic people used to have. Then she went on to tell us it was known that the maid lived on sugar, caffeine
and IRN BRU. IRN BRU is a local beverage that apparently is quite potent. It was supposed to be the equivalent of Red Bull and Pam made sure to put that on her list of things to find in Scotland...they even sold IRN BRU ice cream. Who knew the highly-caffeinated lives downstairs at the castle?
Then it was off, heading down the road to our next spot, not
knowing exactly where it was. We were heading off of the Isle Of Skye and up to
Lock Ness, if we made it. There was just so much beautiful scenery that we kept
stopping for photos. The driving was easier as everyone had gone home from
Spring Break. We stopped for a cup of coffee and a light lunch at a
small tea room in the middle of nowhere. I felt that if we had gone there the day before, we would have been waiting in line at the door. This day it was mostly empty. When the food came was as if it was prepared by
a chef in a fancy restaurant, and the place only had about 6 tables. Pam had
sweet potato pea soup with a design of a spiderweb drizzled on top and I had
the world’s fanciest salad with all kinds of cheeses. We loved it. Something to note about cultural differences in Scotland. You don't tip, or if you do, nobody could tell me how it was done. It wasn't anywhere on the bill, and I got blank looks whenever I inquired about it. We only had credit cards, so it wasn't a question of slipping a bill under the plate. The story is that companies collect a tax that is to be given to the employees as part of their wages...not everyone likes that idea, but the net effect on me was that it seemed not quite as expensive to eat out. There was also the matter of the check. You really had to ask for it. Nothing like back home, where it's "Here's your food!, Here's the check! See you next time!" On many occasions before I figured this out, I would walk to the bar and ask for my check like I was on a tab in a tavern....later I came to understand that this was how they knew I was American...
We drove on peacefully, until it started getting later in
the day and I made a couple of wrong turns and suddenly it was dinner time and
we were in the woods, nowhere near a town, no cellphone service and I wasn’t
really sure where the campground was. We came to a small turn in the road and
saw a hotel with a restaurant on the corner and stopped. This was a really old, small place
that probably had 6 rooms in it. It really looked like someone's old two story house more than it looked like a hotel. The dining area could seat maybe 20 people,
but once again, the food was great and the prices were something like 15 pounds
a person. Pam had an exquisite whiskey-glazed salmon with sliced fresh
vegetables (a rarity there) and I had fish and chips (again). While there, we
looked outside and saw this beautiful bird walking around on the ground and
inquired about it. The waitress shook her head and replied that it was a
pheasant as if everyone in the world should know that bird. I ran outside,
trying to get a photograph of this fantastic bird as the locals shook their
heads. I had the good camera out and had already snapped 50 photographs trying to get a decent shot of this elusive fowl, chasing him from park bench to bush, until he flew off. I looked back in the window and saw that "yup, he's American" and soon saw why, as the birds seemed to be everywhere, just sauntering
across the road and sitting on fenceposts. As we drove off towards the campground, I saw the males and females preening on just about any platform that rose 3 feet from the ground. It must not have been hunting
season.
The real adventure of the day was finding the campground, or
should I say the attempt to find the campground. Google was not my friend that
day. It took us through a tiny village and then onto a single lane road
wandering through hilly pastures. Google was saying that it was 12 miles and
that would take 90 minutes. We laughed until we had driven 6 miles down some of
the scariest road I can remember. This was driving about 15 mph running down
the center of a two lane road with potholes and drop-offs on both sides and
what the Scots call “Blind Summits” which are places where you can’t see the
racing sports car or truck driver that’s late for his pint at the local pub
coming at you until it’s too late. My knuckles were white and Pam was unusually quiet, having gone from yelling to praying.
Finally it was too dark to keep driving down that road that seemed to have no end and I saw a pull off that was good
enough for me. “If the gypsies want us tonight, they are gonna have to drive a
long way to do it!” I said.
I slept, not the great sleep I had on previous nights, but
when I woke in the morning, I did get up to see a great brown hawk, working a field
next to us and pausing occasionally to survey the pasture from a tall tree. It
was also an opportunity to capture the rarest thing of all in Scotland, a
sunrise. This was the first time on the trip that I had awoken to something
besides drizzly rain, and it put me in a great mood straight off.
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