Archive
August 2001| |
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Current entry Archive August 2001 |
What I Did on My Holidays
Parte the Seconde
In Which Our Heroes See A Veritable Plethora of Ancient Wonders (Including Some More Ancient than the Infamous Pyramids of Aegypt) and Also Some Very New Artistic Marvels, Encounter Amusing Unmentionables, Find Avalon, Watch the Cavorting of Amazing Aquatic Monsters, and Cross Swords with a Rude Innkeeper!
Wednesday (1 August)
Whoops.
OK, so we were just going to the museum(s) for a short time, to hunt down the Goldsworthies and maybe see a few other things.
These are good museums. We got completely sucked in. There was a small Egyptian exhibit. There was a complete skeleton of a blue whale. There was an exhibit about the evolution of technology, with items like a bubble car and an Apple II and really old phones. But where were the Goldsworthies? In the end we asked, and it turned out they were in the other museum. We thought they were in the Royal Museum; they're in the National Museum. The two are connected, although their levels don't match up, so level 2 of one might connect to level 3 of the other. Anyway, we'd just pop over to the National Museum and find them.
Astonishing. The National Museum has some really good ideas. For one thing, they treat the museum itself as a work of art, and the objects on display also as art, rather than just curiosities in boxes. The Andy Goldsworthies, when we found them, weren't objects on display themselves, not really, although they did have little identifying plaques; rather, they were backdrops for the actual exhibits. And they had not one Goldsworthy, but three! Plus another one on the roof, which we only found by accident. Four Goldsworthies! Bliss!
The National Museum seemed to focus more on history of human cultures, so when we wandered in the first thing we were faced with was ancient Pictish and Celtic and even prehistoric (8000 BC!) artifacts. They had Lewis chessmen! They had Celtic crosses! And there was a really cool thing they did: Scattered among the prehistoric artifacts, they had little signs telling about how the culture in question used the objects, but written in first person. It really gave a sense of the objects and the culture itself speaking across time. It was quite effective.
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A bishop (87 KB) from the Lewis Chessmen. |
And on each successive level of the museum, they went forward in time, right up through the industrial revolution era and into modern times. There was some absolutely excellent machinery there, including a rotary valve engine and a jacquard loom. They had wonderful CGI stations to explain how each one worked, showing animations of different subsystems in operation. We were lost in delight, for me mitigated only by my camera showing obvious signs of trouble. It had been eating batteries rather too quickly; now it declared a set dead after only about ten pictures. I'd have taken a lot more pictures at the museum than I did had I not had constant battery troubles (and no place to buy more in the museum). There may be something wrong with the batteries I'm buying, or with the camera's battery contacts, or (please no) with the camera itself. Don't know yet. Anyway, to make up for matters, Mike took plenty of photos. He didn't have any battery worries; whenever my camera declares a set of batteries dead, I can give them to him and they last him another couple of days just fine. Grrr.
And there was so much great stuff that I haven't even mentioned. The exhibit of tacky things! The bizarre round radiators! The monochrome teddy bears! The Arabic wood carving! The weird army of jewellery display statues!
Anyway, our short little museum trip turned into a most-of-the-day excursion that stopped only because our pay-and-display (parking lot payment) ran out at about 3:45; we overran it by half an hour anyway.
Our feet were going to fall off so we decided not to go to the mall after all; instead we went back to the B&B to drop dead for a while. The weather had actually improved quite a lot anyway. After we'd recuperated a bit we went back into town to find dinner. This time we went into the New Town. (The Royal Mile is the "Old Town"; just north of it, and about the same size, is a planned section of town called the "New Town" although it's already quite old.) We wandered down Princes Street, taking in excellent views of the castle, working our way through the pre-festival crowds that were already beginning to gather. There were street performers (especially bagpipers), and lots of equipment being set up. We'd found out that the festival officially started on Friday, which is good for us because that's the day we're leaving!
Thursday (2 August)
The expected bad weather rolled in; we woke up to pouring rain, so we went to the mall after all. We bought some very ordinary stuff (jeans, sneakers, new handbag) and also the obligatory CDs. No books though, strangely enough.
By the time we'd finished it had cleared up, so we decided we'd finally tour the castle. The transformation of the Old Town since Tuesday was amazing! The streets were packed, there were street performers everywhere, the pavements (sidewalks) were choked with people who'd set up little shops-onna-blanket, and it was shoulder-to-shoulder with our fellow tourists. The castle itself, not surprisingly, was doing a brisk business. We toured it anyway, kind of going backwards which helped keep the crowding to a minimum. The castle itself is mostly recent; it's been trashed several times, so bits of medieval towers now form part of the base of a later parapet, and so on.
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Mons Meg Relief (115 KB). One really cool thing was that they have some enormous cannon, of which Mons Meg is the biggest and most famous, that are old enough that they themselves are depicted in carvings on the walls of the castle! This photo (courtesy of Mike) is one of those reliefs. You can see the cannon quite clearly. Strange to see the real thing, parked just up the hill a bit. |
On the way back to the car, we did some exploring of the shops along the Royal Mile. In one we saw, and I absolutely swear I'm not making this up--whisky-flavoured McCondoms! Nuff said!
To escape the crowds and rest our feet we set off on another random drive, this time to the east. We picked a ruined castle (Tantallon) some way down the coast as our random destination, knowing full well it'd be closed before we got there but expecting the drive to be nice in itself. As indeed it was; we found dinner in a picturesque little town, and watched the mist roll over the firth and eventually the North Sea.
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Avalon (40 KB). As we neared the castle, we found a perfectly-shaped hill in the middle of a flat plain, with its base obscured by mist. It was just like typical descriptions of Avalon in the various cheesy versions of the Arthurian legends. On the other side of the road was the sea, completely mist-enshrouded, with a single giant rock sticking up from it, with a lighthouse on it. Behind us was the ruined castle. Meanwhile the sun peeked out from the clouds, and the fields nearby were full of tiny red poppies. What more could anyone want? |
Friday (3 August)
Friday was our last morning in Edinburgh. A good thing, with the festival crowds rolling in, but also sad because I quite like it. Anyway, it was another hunt-the-cloud kind of morning, so we thought we'd do a bit more touristing before setting off for tonight's destination--Inverness.
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Holyroodhouse Palace (159 KB). We went to tour Holyroodhouse Palace, which you may recall is the other anchor of the Royal Mile. Most peculiarly, it seems to be built up against a ruined abbey--even sharing a wall with it! Yet when you think about it, they probably were built at the same time. Certainly there was lots of history taking place at the palace in the 1500s. Probably the abbey was just allowed to go to ruin, and the castle wasn't. |
Then we wandered up Canongate again in the latest instalment of the never-ending search for tea. At a place called Clarinda's we lucked into the third-best cream tea I've ever had. (I'm quite sure of that statistic. First, for pure poshness and quality, has to be Lords of the Manor; second was a tearoom in Corbridge, Northumbria, whose name I unfortunately can't remember, for excellence of scones, jam, cream, and presentation. It's in the jam, really. If the jam is fresh, especially if it arrives in a bowl with a spoon rather than requiring a knife for applying, you know you're a happy camper.)
But now it was time to leave. Getting out of Edinburgh was very trafficky--the festival was beginning tonight, and the place was really heating up--but eventually we achieved escape velocity and were ejected in a northerly direction. (Over the Forth Bridge, incidentally, but not the rail bridge; the ordinary suspension bridge just a mile or so upriver.) Our route was again on minor roads, although we'd have made better time than we did had we been able to resist stopping every five minutes to photograph something or check out an interesting place. As it was, we spontaneously visited the grounds of a place called Blair Castle, where the resident dukes have been collecting really tall trees for a century or two. I was impressed, and I'm from Maine. They'd apparently had a bad storm or fire or something recently; there were many trees in the process of being removed. The stumps were incredible. Most of these trees were thicker than I am tall. Sad to think of these 150-year-old trees having to come down.
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Blair Castle panorama (91 KB). Mostly for the benefit of American readers, this is a photo of a castle that people still live in. This one is relatively new, and self-consciously much more Disney-esque than most, but you can at least get an idea of what an enormous pile a castle generally is! |
Despite ourselves, we did eventually reach Inverness, whereupon we cheerfully collapsed.
Saturday (4 August)
Although our welcome at our Inverness B&B seemed friendly enough last night, apparently our hostess either disapproves of our lifestyle and feels compelled to tell us so, or she is somehow oblivious of how breathtakingly rude she is. She had a couple of unbelievably disparaging comments to share with us at breakfast. I won't share them with you, because they were embarrassing enough then. Suffice it to say, we were glad we'd only be there one more night, and resolved to tip-toe whenever we had to enter or leave!
Inverness itself turned out to be surprisingly newish, so we only stayed in its city centre long enough to get some tourist information and have tea. A small river runs gently through the middle of town, crossed most entertainingly by two footbridges in addition to the usual bridges for cars. The bridge we crossed was an experience; it's a suspension bridge, but the walkway isn't attached to the bridge piers, rather it's sort of slung, so the bridge bounces significantly in response to anyone walking on it. We didn't try the other one, or any of the smaller bridges that interconnect a group of small islands further down the river.
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Squall approaching Culloden Battlefield (49 KB). Our first stop of the day was the battlefield at Culloden, site of one of the many blood-soaked events that pepper Scottish history. Here on a cold and sleeting day in 1745 a Scottish army, in support of Bonnie Prince Charlie, lost utterly to an English force, who apparently proceeded to butcher the Scottish wounded. The field (which is behind me, not actually in this photo) is surprisingly large, and partly overgrown with bushes and heather today (although they employ sheep to help keep the growth in check), and, of course, innocent and peaceful-looking. It's impossible to imagine what it must have been like. Nasty. |
After lunch an attempt to take back roads to Clava Cairns brought us by Cawdor Castle, so we stopped in because they have a hedge maze and I still haven't been in one yet. Unfortunately the maze turned out to be closed, but the grounds and gardens were still quite nice in the usual impressive way.
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Clava Cairns (166 KB). When we eventually found Clava Cairns, I finally got to see my first stone circles! There are three cairns on the site, each within its own ring of standing stones, thought to be something like 4,000 to 5,000 years old, which makes them contemporaries of the Pyramids. Wow. This is a snippet of the stone circle around the third cairn; you can also see one of the other cairns off in the distance. Typically, the single-track lane that brought us here actually runs through one edge of this stone circle; one of the stones is on the other side of the road, and one stone is actually part of the stone wall on this side of the road. |
Our next random destination was Fort George, supposed to be interesting from a fortification point of view, although we never did see for ourselves because by the time we arrived they had just closed. We did get some excellent photos across the firth and of the nearby bays, including rain squalls off in the distance.
Our final random destination of the day was Cromarty Point at the tip of the Black Isle, which we found in due course after also finding a place to have dinner. There's a lighthouse there, which was nice, but we got an unexpected bonus: Dolphins frequent the area, and they were busy. I've seen them before at SeaWorld and other such places, but it's not the same seeing them in the wild. They have to let you see them, so it feels more special. They weren't very far off shore, either; probably only a few yards out. One of them even caught a fish as we watched.
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Dolphins (84 KB). Of course we tried to photograph them, but they would surface and dive and swim very quickly, so they weren't easy to catch. Eventually I had the idea of putting my camera in Continuous Drive mode, where it basically takes pictures until you let go of the button, and I had some success with that (as well as a zillion failures); but we also didn't know where they'd surface next, so it wasn't useful to zoom in on a particular area of water, which means the pictures I do have are mostly water with veeery small dolphins in it. This one is about the best I did. Along the way I accidentally got some very nice pictures of dramatic evening sky, but that's not really what I was aiming for. |
Finally we came back to the B&B (successfully avoiding the ogress when we came in; hooray). It was already after 10:00. We actually thought, when we set out on this holiday, that we'd have a lot of quiet nights; we brought a lot of books to make sure we'd have something to do. Most places roll up the sidewalks by 6:00, so we thought that after dinner we'd have nothing much to do. What we failed to consider is that the scenery doesn't close, and it's still light until nearly 10:00, so we keep staying out late looking at things. Then, when we get back to the B&B, we nearly always have to empty the camera cards. For me that means a 64MB card, plus an 8MB card which is the only one that can take panoramic shots (so I keep having to swap cards during the day). Then there's also Mike's 64MB card. Our picture-taking rate doesn't seem to have decreased any, so emptying the cards can, ahem, take a while. And then, of course, we have to look at all the pictures to see how we did! You can't really get more than a rough idea from the camera's tiny LCD screen.
But some of that may change in the next few days. We're really heading into the hinterlands now, which may mean quieter evenings. One of our travel books has piqued our interest in the Hebrides--Skye, which is now reachable by bridge, and Lewis & Harris, which require a ferry trip. These are truly remote places. We've booked a B&B for the next two nights on Skye, but Lewis & Harris require some coordination; we have to book a B&B and the ferry, and it's entirely possible that we won't be able to make that work.
Our technology has been handy; I've been using my mobile phone as a modem, which although slow does work. I can connect to the internet, search for B&Bs, check the weather, and even check my email. But it may well be impossible to get reception in the remote areas where we are going. We'll find out...
Tomorrow morning, we're driving down the Great Glen, which means we'll be going down Loch Ness! Will we see the monster?
Created at 23:32
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What I Did on My Holidays
Parte the Third
In Which Our Heroes Burble Incoherently at the Grandeur of the World, Have the Best Cream Tea Ever, Go to Nowhere--and Past It, Make the Earth Shake, Chase Mountains, Wonder Whether They Have Accidentally Gone to the Moon, and are Menaced by Mad Dogs!
(Also Your Faithful Narrator Is Mortified by the Behaviour of Her Countrymen.)
Sunday (5 August)
We escaped the lunatic B&B-keeper with only minor damages, despite having to stave off a second salvo of passive-aggressive rude comments at breakfast. Although this time she didn't confine her attentions to us; she inquired of another breakfasting couple where they were going today, "after church, of course." Passive-aggressive nastiness. Good riddance!
Our route took us down the Great Glen, then turned west toward the islands. Our first sight of Loch Ness was suitably impressive; it's very long and large. We stopped at the head of the loch for some photo-taking. There was actually a Nessie-hunting van parked there!
You can drive down either the east or west side of the loch. The western side is by far the more traditional; it has bigger roads, and towns that cater to the Nessie legend. The eastern side has single-track roads and sheep. Guess which side we took. Unfortunately we couldn't actually see the loch very often; there were generally thick woods between us and the edge. Eventually, after a few tea-finding and waterfall-viewing adventures, we reached the southern end of the loch, a town called Fort Augustus. It was a zoo! There were people and tour buses everywhere, tacky shops and long lines. We filled up the car (which had been getting hungry) and got out quickly. Because we hadn't seen much of the loch proper, and it wasn't very late in the day yet, we started up the west side, but it turned out that that side had woods between the road and the loch as well, so partway up we took a westward turn and said good-bye to the loch. No Nessie sightings for us.
As we headed west, the day went from overcast to actively raining. As seems to be standard for us on this trip, it conveniently waited to rain until our travel days. Can't complain about that! Even through the rain, the scenery was impressive; this area of Scotland is blatantly glacial, with deep-carved valleys and sudden steep-sided, deeply eroded hills and mountains. We'd watch clouds form at mountaintops; then it would rain for about five minutes and stop; then we could watch the next cloud form.
As we neared Skye, we got to see a castle I've been wanting to see for a long time: Eilean Donan. It's one of the most photogenic castles you could ever hope to see, not so much for itself as because it's on a tiny island, and connects to the mainland by a multi-arched stone bridge. I've seen it used as a setting many times in British productions, long before I ever came here. I never really expected to see it in person, I must say. Sadly, the weather meant that the pictures we took came out damply uninspiring and not worth posting; but who knows, perhaps on the way back through we'll get better conditions.
As we headed onto Skye (via the most expensive toll bridge I've ever been over in my life, £5.70 each way, apparently a source of great unrest for the natives), the weather began to clear a bit, giving us some views of Skye. The road took us around great peninsulas; the landscape was impressively jaggy and loch-y.
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Trotternish Ridge (57 KB). Then, as we rounded one particular peninsula, we saw, off to the north, the most impressive bit of geology I've ever seen: an enormous ridge, gently sloped on the west, rising to a knife-edge and dropping off suddenly on the east. Wow. Consulting the map revealed that it was apparently the spine of the Trotternish, an entire large section of Skye, which meant it was still very far away. That ridge was miles long to be visible from so far! We were enchanted. This is not a terribly good photo, even after Mike tweaked it, but I really wanted to include one from that first impression. |
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Approaching Squall (47 KB). After stopping for dinner, we headed over the central hump of Skye to our B&B, which was on the west coast of the Trotternish. As we came over that central hump, down onto the west coast, all we could do was burble incoherently at the dramatic landscape, especially as we were nearing Magic Hour. I'm afraid things are going to get a bit more photographic at this point. Indeed I'm having a dreadful time trying to winnow the pictures down a bit. |
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Disgusting Palm Trees (128 KB). I can't believe it and I can't imagine how, but these are not the only palm trees we saw in the Hebrides. They aren't in pots; these particular ones are about 20 ft tall and obviously can't be brought in for the winter. |
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Our Room at Kilmuir (151 KB). To top things off, our B&B (Kilmuir House, I highly recommend it) turned out to be fantastic as well; they even gave us tea and biscuits when we came in the door! This is a panoramic photo of our room, so the perspective is all weird, but I think you can get the idea. |
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Front Garden at Kilmuir (136 KB). This is a corner of the front garden at Kilmuir House. I thought it was delightful. |
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A Headland Near Kilmuir (88 KB). No sooner had we dropped our bags (and had tea) than we dashed back out to burble and splutter some more. We continued north, nearly to the point of Trotternish, turning back only when sunset approached. This is fairly typical of the Skye coastline. Mind that first step; it's usually a few hundred feet. |
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A House with a View (109 KB). Most houses have an astonishing view either out the front or the back. Or both. This house's location rather reminded me of Uncle George's. The neighbour ratio is similarly satisfactory. |
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End of a Fine Day (33 KB). My battery problems really set in with a vengeance during the afternoon. Around sunset they gave out entirely. Mike spent half an hour snapping sunset pictures after I had to stop, only giving up around 9:40 when, although the sunset hadn't quite finished, it had clouded up over Lewis & Harris enough that the sunset couldn't really be seen any more. |
Monday (6 August)
The morning began cloudy, but it cleared up as the day wore on. We suspect that's the normal pattern here. Actually we suspect that nothing we are seeing is normal, and that we're here for Skye's Annual Two Days of Nice Weather. The guide books imply, none too subtly, that it's often somewhat cloudy here. Our morning overcast came and went, but never really amounted to much. I should also mention that it's not especially hot here. The UK as a whole doesn't have hot summers, but here the official predicted highs are about 55°F for the next few days. In August! But I have to say, I really haven't been cold. In the sun, it gets uncomfortably warm very quickly; but get out of the car and wander out onto a headland, and you get a strong breeze that feels chilly. Or if the sun goes behind clouds, then it doesn't feel very warm.
We began the morning by going into Uig, the village where the ferry to Lewis & Harris docks, to book passage on the Tuesday ferry, returning on Friday (which round trip, by the way, cost £98). Conveniently, the tourist information centre was right in the same building, so we also had them book accommodations for our three nights there (as we half-expected, mobile reception at our B&B is flat dead zero, so we couldn't make calls ourselves). This turned out to be more difficult than we'd expected--apparently the BBC are shooting something there and have snapped up most of the available accommodations. We eventually worked out that Castaway, a popular British series, happened on Taransay, a small abandoned island just west of Harris. Presumably they're doing a year-later retrospective. It took a while, but the plucky tourist information centre staffer came through for us, so it all worked out happily in the end.
Starting our day proper, we drove north again, but this time not stopping at the tip of Trotternish. Rather, we continued around the point and down the east side. Everywhere we looked, it was high cliffs, sharp edges, knife-like ridges, and ocean like glass. I can't believe how flat the ocean has been.
Anyway. A short way down the east side, we stopped for the obligatory tea, at a place called Flodigarry House Hotel. Their menu only mentioned cream teas in the afternoon, but we thought it couldn't hurt to ask, and indeed they said they'd be happy to serve us cream teas. It was nice enough that we sat at an outside table. (In fact we both got a touch of sunburn.) After fifteen or twenty minutes we began to wonder if they'd forgotten us, when out they came, and we fell straight into the middle of heaven.
Your basic garden-variety cream tea includes tea, a scone each, and butter, jam, and cream to put on the scone. (You don't, despite what you might infer from the name, put cream in the tea.) This cream tea included four scones. And butter and jam and cream, of course, with the jam in a bowl as I think I described back in Edinburgh. And four pancakes, no idea what we were supposed to do with those. And four melt-in-your-mouth shortbread biscuits (cookies). And two chocolate truffles rolled in coconut. And two slices of some kind of nut-coated pie. And two incredibly dense slabs of chocolate brownie with confectioner's sugar on top. And, and--I'm not done yet!--and two meringues, piled high with whipped cream, on and in which were various small slices of fruit (kiwi, strawberry etc).
Oh yes, and tea.
Sigh...
And we weren't even exactly hungry! But we were duty-bound to have a go at it. And in fact we did pretty well; we didn't touch the pancakes, and didn't have more than a bite of the nut-coated pie, and left half a brownie or so; but the rest of it vanished.
This cream tea, needless to say, rocketed straight to the top of my internal informal ratings list without passing Go and without collecting £200. If you are ever, ever on Skye, stop at Flodigarry House Hotel for a cream tea. You won't need lunch afterwards. We certainly didn't.
Full to the gills, we waddled on southward, not, it has to be said, making very good time. There was too much to see. Depressingly, my battery situation hadn't got any better overnight, so I didn't end up taking as many pictures as I'd perhaps have liked to during the day. Whether this is a bad thing I will leave up to you to decide.
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Trotternish Teeth (117 KB). Impressive chunks of the Trotternish backbone have fallen off and been left standing as jagged tooth-like ridges. The teeth near the background of this picture are, oh, a few hundred feet tall. |
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Kilt Rocks (124 KB). This area of cliff consists of basalt columns, so from a distance they look pleated, hence the name. And see what I mean about the ocean being like glass? |
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Cyan rowboat and blue sky reflected in a small pond (83 KB). Those white blobs are sheep. |
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Erosion Near Lethe Falls (127 KB). Lethe Waterfall plunges into a gorge which shortly reaches the ocean. The cliffs on either side of the gorge are quite high, steep, and impressively lethal. This picture was taken at the mouth of the gorge, where it has widened and flattened quite a lot. (For an idea of scale, the white dots are sheep.) See the strange irregular terracing covering the hillside? We suppose that's probably erosion, but it often looks like agricultural terracing. It's everywhere on Skye--everywhere that isn't flat or perpendicular, that is. What really boggled me was the picnic area along the edge of the gorge. Picnic tables sit within ten feet of a fenceless plummet. Families casually lunched right next to the edge, their children running around without much (apparent) supervision. In thinking about it, most houses on Skye are perched within a few hundred feet (at most) of a cliff, and they can't very well put fences around the perimeter of the entire island. I think the residents must take the hazard for granted. The cliffs were so impressive, and the drop so imminent, that I actually had dreams that night that I was falling off them. |
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Islands Panorama (221 KB). Looking across to the Scottish mainland. I quite like these small rocky islets. Again, note the absurdly calm ocean. (For viewing panoramas, I recommend opening them full-size in whatever your viewer is, then scrolling slowly to the other end. This creates the sense of standing there and turning your head.) |
Hmm. A couple of things I've failed to mention now come into play here. The first is that much of the land surface of Skye is thickly covered in peat, and hence waterlogged. You might ask, smugly, "What, even the vertical parts?" But part of the magic of peat is that it can hold water in complete defiance of gravity. You can huff and puff your way up a steep hill that goes squish underfoot the whole way.
The second thing is that all along, the map had been indicating prehistoric sites of interest--hill forts, duns (an inconsistently-defined term), standing stones, etc. We also had picked up a little booklet called "Prehistoric Skye" which showed far more sites. So all along, we'd been noting that the map indicated something prehistoric up ahead, and watching for it, but eventually having to conclude that we'd missed it. In a rock-strewn landscape, significant rocks aren't always easy to identify, especially if you can't wander freely across other people's property. Anyway, we were watching for yet another hill fort off on the left, when suddenly there it was, in obvious splendour, just off the road!
Well. We leapt out and went to have a look. Getting there was very squashy, thanks to the peat and a small stream. Then we had a bit of a mountain-goat-like climb up the hillock, which was steep and also covered with rocks fallen from the hill fort. But we made it to the top soon enough. While we stood there admiring the view and the tumbledown pile of ancient rocks, a great thing happened--someone decided that the flock of sheep in a nearby field really should be in a different one, so we got to watch the shepherd, plus a team of children and a border collie, herd them through a gate, across the stream, across the road and up a hill into the other field. It was cool. It's all very well to watch pedigree dogs herd a few sheep in trials, but this was the real thing. A car even got stranded on the road as the flock went by all around it.
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Dunvegan Head (68 KB). For our next destination, we selected a ruined medieval church on the Waternish. (Hmm. Imagine Skye as an extremely mutant starfish. Trotternish and Waternish, along with several other -nishes, are all legs of the starfish.) Along the way, we were forced to endure more scenery like this. We suffered through it. |
On the way back, we stopped for dinner at a nice little inn, which would have been unremarkable except for the arrival partway through of an American couple, who proceeded to behave in such an obnoxious and supercilious way that I wanted to curl up and die in mortification. Or at least never open my mouth again, so that nobody would lump me in with that kind of American. It's amazing anyone ever lets us out of the country, or that they don't just shoot us on sight when we show up. It's no wonder there's such a terrible stereotype of the American tourist. She actually asked the waitress whether the kitchen would remove her lobster shell for her, so she wouldn't have to see the eyes looking at her, hahaha. He actually asked the waitress to find out what kind of grapes the red wines on the wine list were made from. She wanted to take a picture of the inn, but there was a car in the way so she asked someone to move it. And it just went on and on. It was screamingly hilarious yet deeply embarrassing, all at the same time. It's a wonder my head didn't explode from the contradictory imperatives.
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Distant Cuillin (104 KB). Somewhere along the way, we spotted a very compact range of jaggy mountains off to the south. We kept seeing them, off and on. Eventually we got curious and looked on the map for something that might be them, and found The Cuillin, a dramatic and mysterious-sounding part of the island. There is only one single-track road into that region; hiking is the usual way in. It's a tiny region, yet has something like 20 peaks over 3,000 ft. And my my, was it photogenic. So we thought we'd drive toward them and see what we could see. The chase itself was fun, trying to extrapolate from the map what our best route for further approach should be, even as we watched the lighting on the peaks change and watched them get closer. In this photo, they are still quite far away; you can see the compact nature of the region--jaggy, jaggy, jaggy, whoops done. We agreed that they seemed Tolkienesque--the kinds of mountains that Tolkien characters are always having to traverse, that never seem quite plausible when reading about them. Yet there they were. |
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Black Cuillin Panorama (203 KB). This is what they looked like when we reached our closest approach. Check out the large peak toward the right edge--Skye would seem to have a graffiti problem with delinquent giants. Or maybe giant delinquents. |
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Red Cuillin (92 KB). Just beyond the Cuillin, we were suddenly confronted by mountains of a completely different character. The handy guide (which we only read reactively) explained that there are two Cuillins--the Red Cuillin, ordinary granite mountains, and the "true" or Black Cuillin, made of something called gabbro. In any case, the contrast was striking. The Red Cuillin look like they've had chocolate sauce poured on top. |
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Another Sunset (56 KB). As you can tell from the photos, sunset was upon us by this time, especially because we were on the shadowed eastern end of the island. So we dashed back across to the western shore, heading for our B&B, but were just a bit too late to catch anything but the end of it. |
It was a long day--but I assure you, it was even longer in the doing than in the telling. Emptying the cameras was a non-trivial task--between us, we took nearly 300 pictures in this single day.
Tuesday (7 August)
The ferry trip was easy; the ocean was still like glass. Only at the very bow could any rocking be felt. Amusingly, we saw the Horrible Americans on the ferry. What could they want in such a remote place as Lewis & Harris?
We came up with a plan during the hour-and-a-half ferry trip, so we implemented it as soon as we drove off. We darted northward, to explore Lewis first. Our route would take us up the east coast, to see some of the famous sands and also a bridge to nowhere.
I think our first sight of the Lewis landscape shocked us both. We were expecting, thanks to the guide books, that Lewis, Harris and Skye were all pretty much the same, with Lewis & Harris obviously being more remote due to being bridgeless islands. In reality, they have very little in common. Skye is jagged cliffs and green fields; Lewis & Harris are flat or rolling, rock-strewn and desolate. The ground is covered by as much as six feet of peat in most places, meaning that not much can grow. The ground cover is heather, straggly grass, thistles, and some very determined-looking other tough plants. Imagine Mount Desert Island (those of you who've been there) minus all the trees. And I mean all! There have been some initiatives to plant trees on Lewis & Harris; we passed one such grove quite early on. Some of the trees were hanging on, but others had died and been bleached where they stood. The dead trees looked like they were made of ice. If you filmed a tree in time-lapse over a few years, you'd see it die, turn white, and then seem to be sucked slowly into the irresistible embrace of the relentless peat. Brrr!
But to be fair, Lewis & Harris had a tough act to follow after the beauty of Skye. We've already concluded that we can never go back to Skye again, because we could never be so lucky with the weather a second time. It just wouldn't be the same. And in any event, we had mostly come here to see prehistoric things anyway. There are a lot of them, because they keep finding them buried and bleached in the peat.
We were certainly right that Lewis & Harris are even more remote than Skye. Almost all the roads--even the A-roads--are single-track, some of them so basic they look like someone just painted a thin black stripe across the ground. Skye did have a few stretches of road that weren't single-track. We have truly arrived at the end of the world here.
We drove straight to Stornoway, quite a fair distance, encountering only a few scattered houses along the way. Stornoway is the largest city on Lewis & Harris. We had lunch there and browsed around in the shops, and found a delightful fish-mobile which we plan to hang from the bathroom ceiling.
Geology apparently has a sense of humour, because in the midst of the blasted desolation of Lewis & Harris there is an oddity: they have the most spectacular beaches you could ever hope to see. Sometimes the sand stretches for miles, and the water is even that teal colour you normally only see in the Caribbean. We saw our first of these Sands just north of Stornoway. North of that, the road comes to a sudden end; there isn't a complete loop around Lewis. At the end of the road there is a bridge spanning a gorge; after that, the road turns into a hiking path. For obvious reasons, the bridge is called the Bridge to Nowhere. We crossed it, so that must mean we've now been Nowhere. I believe it.
Our hotel for the night was in Carloway, a village on the west coast of the island, so we took the smaller of the two roads across the island. I thought we'd seen desolation already; I was wrong. The ten or twelve miles it takes to cross the island contains absolutely nothing. It's mostly flat, without a tree or house the entire distance, and is one single enormous peat bog. The islanders burn peat to heat their houses. In the spring, they cut great strips of it from the ground, cut it into blocks, and leave the blocks there to dry. Later they come back and bring the blocks home, where they stack them in an enormous pile. We could see these peat cuttings everywhere around us. The guide book quite accurately described them as looking like stretch marks on the landscape.
Amazingly, we had some difficulty finding our hotel. Towns here don't have a centre; the houses are just plopped down anywhere, so it's difficult to say where town really is. In fact it reminded me of New Mexico for that reason. I suspect that most thinly-populated places look like that, but you can't tell because of the trees. Here you can see houses just randomly situated, strung out along the road. Eventually we finally found it (it wasn't actually in Carloway). The hotel even had a petrol pump out front--90p/L! This is definitely the highest price either of us have ever seen for petrol. Not surprising, considering the many adventures it must have had to get there.
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Dun Carloway (108 KB). Once checked in, we went out again, to visit a nearby broch. Brochs are cylindrical dwellings, made of drystone, standing about 40' tall. The outside is a double wall, with voids and stairs between. They were built mostly between 100BC and 100AD. This one, Dun Carloway, is one of the best preserved ones still in existence. In this picture, I am outside, looking at the front door. The front wall only survives to the height of the door lintel, but the back wall rises to about 20' high. You can see the wall rising as it sweeps around to the back, and also see the double-wall construction (mostly by seeing the black void between the two walls). At least I hope you can; the lighting conditions weren't the greatest. |
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Mind Your Navel (102 KB). The door into the broch is only about 3.5 ft high; you really have to crouch to get in. Inside the broch, there is just an open space, with three more tiny doors leading into the void between the outer and inner walls. These doors are really small. I had to do a sort of chicken-walk to get through one of them. This is Mike standing in the void between the walls, behind the tallest of the three interior doors. |
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Stone Wall Endcap (96 KB; Mike's photo). From here, although we realised we were probably being laughably optimistic, we set out to investigate the local dining options. The guide book did mention one or two restaurants in the local area, of which we managed to find one. At least we think we did. There was a sign at the end of the driveway, but the place itself looked deserted. But we were heartened and much amused by the way some wit had finished their stone wall! But when we got out of the car, a dog that had been keeping an eye on us came over to check us out. I did the usual crouch, hand out, Nice Doggie Then routine--and he growled, put all his hackles up and wouldn't look at me. Suddenly it looked like a long way to the (alleged) front door. We bravely ran away. |
The hotel restaurant wasn't bad...
Wednesday (8 August)
Another grey start to the weather. We checked out and went to see Calanais stone circle. Where we wanted to park, there were again two openly hostile border collies that came right up to the car and waited for us to get out, but eventually they lost interest in us and went away.
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Calanais Overview (97 KB). This is a really big site! It is an enormous cross, with a circle at the center. This is an overview of most of the site (although one leg of the cross continues quite some distance further), to give you an idea of its size. It probably was built around 3000BC, which makes it yet another contemporary of the Pyramids. |
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Central Circle at Calanais (94 KB). |
We then had a very nice cup of tea at the adjacent tearoom, which is in a converted blackhouse (we'll get to blackhouses in a minute). Then we went to look at two more stone circles less than a mile away. These ones are smaller, but probably similarly ancient. Getting to the third circle involved a 200-yard walk across peat bog from the second circle. In between trying to distinguish between solid ground and solid-looking ground, we had some fun playing with it. Mike demonstrated the fibrous nature of peat--he jumped up and down on a section, and the ground vibrated about four feet away. Then later we found a bit with a Jell-O consistency; Mike stood on it and rocked back and forth, and the whole thing wobbled and even made waves, out to quite a distance. Amazing stuff, peat.
Finished with wiggling the ground, we hopped back in the car and headed north up the west coast of Lewis. Our intention was to go to the lighthouse at the northernmost tip, having lunch in nearby Port Nis, the second largest town on Lewis. Along the way, we got sidetracked by a museum of restored blackhouses. Blackhouses are long, thin drystone houses with a thatched roof--and no chimney. They burned peat in a central fire in the middle of the floor. When we went in, it was obvious why they were called blackhouses; everything was encrusted with soot. The smoke curled visibly in the air. We stopped to boggle at the "No Smoking" sign just outside...
(Linda--this is when you rang us on the mobile.)
Having by now gotten a clue about how things work here, we checked the guide book and found that there was one, count 'em, one tearoom in Port Nis. We couldn't find it. The lady at the post office told us that it had closed, but that the Historical Society might give us tea, as indeed they did (they told us they've started serving tea because they took pity on the bus tours after the tea room closed).
It's difficult to describe the absolute desolation on Lewis. Maine is a teeming metropolis by comparison. There aren't many people, but even for the few there are, there seems a paucity of services. There are literally no restaurants on the entire western side of Lewis except for our hotel, and as it turned out, our hotel was not a hotel, but rather the hotel. Grocery stores, petrol stations--they just don't exist. People must have to go to Stornoway for everything. If you lived on Lewis, you could forget about any of the entertainment options we take for granted; you're not going to a restaurant, you're not going shopping for books or CDs or anything else, and you're certainly not going to see a film. Life must be rather bleak. On the other hand, they may like it that way; religion is very strong here, to the point where everything, including public transportation, closes on Sundays (some B&B owners don't even want you to check in or out) and no work is done. For people visiting, clearly your best bet would be a self-catering holiday, or bringing a caravan (camper).
We can't help wondering how the Horrible Americans are doing...
Anyway, we found the lighthouse, which we think is the northernmost either of us have ever been. We were suitably impressed at the cliffs, especially the way they are obviously crumbling away. Large chunks of it were just waiting their turn to fall off.
Our B&B for the next two nights is on Harris, the politically-if-not-geographically separate island at the southern end of Lewis, so our next step was to drive there and find it. As expected, it was on the minimalist side, but comfortable. When we went in, we were immediately attacked by yet another dog with an attitude problem ("She's really friendly when she gets to know you!"), but it was kept behind shut doors the rest of the time we were there.
We went into Tarbert, the main village of Harris (and the place where the ferry docks), to find dinner. There was exactly one choice, although it had sub-choices. The Harris Hotel has a restaurant proper, but also a pub and a semi-separate restaurant called Harvest Restaurant or something like that. We had a fine dinner there, but we were glad we got there early, as it filled up quickly.
Dinner handled, we set off to use the remaining daylight checking out the Harris topography. It is, if anything, even more blasted than Lewis; whereas Lewis, especially the northern end, tends toward flat peat bogs, Harris has rolling mountains strewn with boulders. But it also has the majority of the Sands, the amazing beaches. We were appropriately agog. As if it's not enough that they have two-mile-long Caribbean-looking beaches here, the beach isn't just a narrow strip along the ocean frontage; it extends deep inland. Imagine a V-shaped ocean inlet, but floor it with sand instead of ocean. When the tide is out, you have three or four miles of sand; when it comes in, you have about six inches of ocean on top of it.
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Rainbow at Seilebost Sands (74 KB). To our delight, the intermittent rain squalls had an unexpected bonus--rainbows. You can almost see the secondary outer ring of this one, about halfway across the photo to the left of the main ring. |
Thursday (9 August)
In the morning, after taking a drive out on Scalpay Island (mostly to see the single-track bridge that leads to it), we stopped in Tarbert for tea. During tea, I got a phone call from work. Actually I've had several already, but this one included news that absolutely infuriated me and really put a damper on the rest of the day, and presumably will affect the remaining days of holiday as well. It's not worth going into much detail at the moment; perhaps later. Suffice it to say, they're sending my two Texans back for another two weeks to "help" us, starting a week after I get back from holiday. Lovely. We have jumped through hoops to avoid having this happen, and it's all been for nothing. It probably doesn't sound like much because I haven't said much in this diary about the politics that pervade my new job; you'll just have to trust me that it's annoying. Really annoying. I-want-to-quit-on-Monday annoying.
Right. Anyway. Put it out of my mind.
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Sands (101 KB). We headed back down the west side of Harris, eventual destination the much-restored St. Clement's Church in Rodel at the southernmost tip. Along the way, of course, we were forced to gaze upon the amazing sands again. The tide is in; we're standing at the back of the V, looking out across the six-inch-deep ocean toward the actual beach part of the Sands. You can see it way off in the distance; it's about three miles from where we are, just before the dark blue bit that is the actual ocean. I love the colour layering. |
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Sands Panorama (418 KB). This is looking at the frontal beach of that same Sands. You can see the water-covered sands of the previous photo at the right edge, behind the spit of sand; that's all uncovered beach when the tide is out. Notice the obscenely turquoise water. Also notice the mountains in the background--do they look like Mount Desert Island minus trees or what? Sometimes it was so desolate, rock-covered, and plantless that we wondered whether we'd taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up on the moon. |
St Clement's Church in Rodel was really cool. It was built in the 1500s, although it stole from a previous structure (it has ancient grotesques incorporated into it). When it was finally finished, it was apparently only used for ten years before some reformation or other rendered it obsolete. Since then it's been restored many times, but apparently not actually used. What we liked about it was that it contains three elaborate crypts of clan leaders of the MacLeods, with amazing carving, and also had some separate slabs of more amazing carving (former flagstones-slash-tomb covers, apparently, removed from the floor to preserve them).
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Tomb Cover (126 KB). A tomb cover for a MacLeod, circa 1550. I like the crusader look of him. Also notice how his left hand is gripping a dirk. |
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Who Gets Him? (107 KB; Mike's photo). The first MacLeod had a tomb covering like the photo above, but also had an elaborately-carved arched niche. It consisted of many small scenes, of which this is one. Apparently St. Michael and the devil are weighing a soul to see who gets it, muhaha. |
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Saltings (128 KB). On our way back up the west coast, we passed a salting. The sea salt permeates these strange chunks of ground. The sheep know this and come nibble on it. Just one more surreal thing. |
After another stop, this time to see the Clan MacLeod Standing Stone, we went back into Tarbert for dinner--at the same place. We'd have tried the restaurant in the hotel proper, but they weren't serving yet.
Lewis & Harris is a hard place to like. I expect that like New Mexico, one gets accustomed to the muted palette and invariant topography in time. We haven't been here long enough to get used to it. Also the remoteness and lack of services means we have to plan carefully because options are few or nonexistent, and this just isn't our strong point. We can't figure out whether they want tourists or want to discourage them. I suspect it's a bit of both. It must also be very difficult to run a tourist-dependent business here; the tourist season is probably only July and August. They have large, well-laid-out historical society centres in both Nis and Tarbert, apparently welcoming tourists. Yet here in Tarbert, they looked at us suspiciously and proceeded to talk to each other only in Gaelic (did I mention that Gaelic is the first language of most people in the Hebrides?).
Anyway, we came back to the B&B early tonight, to get a good rest and also to book a B&B for tomorrow night. From here we're basically going straight back home, breaking up the trip by staying in the Fort William area tomorrow night, then Helen's the next night. It took a few calls to find a place with a vacancy; apparently it's a big weekend in that area.
Oh, and we also booked dinner tomorrow night at Flodigarry House Hotel, the same place where we had the Amazing Cream Tea. The ferry docks at Uig at about 5:30; we've booked dinner at 6:30. That should give us time to drive over the spine of Trotternish and get there.
Created at 23:59
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What I Did on My Holidays
Parte the Last
In Which Our Heroes Reluctantly Turn Homeward, Only to be Beset by Many Difficulties!
Friday (10 August)
The ferry was scheduled to leave at 4:00, but we had to be at the pier by 3:30 at the latest, so we didn't go very far afield. Instead we did a bit of shopping at the touristy shops in Tarbert, after driving around a few of the extremely squiggly peninsulae of southeastern Harris in the morning.
The ferry got a late start, not actually leaving until 4:30, but we made it to Uig by shortly after 6:00, which was still time enough to get to Flodigarry for our dinner reservation. It very nearly wasn't, because in driving over the ridge of Skye we were forced to go past lots of striking and dramatic scenery, some of which we probably came close to driving right off of.
Dinner took a while, so it wasn't until about 8:30 that we made to set off from Flodigarry. It being already rather late, we thought we'd call our B&B to let them know we'd be arriving quite late.
"Erm, I'm sorry, we're fully booked tonight."
"Yes, I know, we're already reserved, we're just letting you know we'll be late."
"Er, your name's not in the book...Oh, here you are, but the reservation is for tomorrow night, not tonight!"
"What?!"
Apparently there'd been a mistake and they'd recorded us on the wrong night.
So now what? We already knew, because we'd called them all the night before, that there was no B&B availability in the Fort William area. Well. We picked another sizeable town, Oban, about 30 miles further south from Fort William, knowing nothing about it except that it was big enough to have a lot of guest arrangements. After calling quite a few--probably a dozen--we found one that had had a last-minute cancellation! Hooray! It was a twin room (which, for American readers, means two single beds) but who cares!
So, in good cheer, we headed off Skye. It took longer to get off the island than I thought it would--over an hour. I always underestimate travel times here. Even when I make allowances for the fact that I always underestimate travel time here, I still underestimate. It's not all that big a country, geographically, but you just can't drive across it very quickly. This is especially true in remote parts of Scotland, where even the best A-roads are only one lane in each direction, so you can easily get trapped behind a slow-moving vehicle, or be slow-moving yourself as the road twists and turns along the edge of lochs and mountainsides.
But finally, shortly after dark, we made it off Skye. We'd reconciled ourselves, while having dinner, to the idea that we were going to be too late to take Magic Hour photos of Eilean Donan (the highly photogenic castle we'd passed on our arrival at Skye; see earlier diary entries). But we crested a hill...
...and damn nearly stopped dead in our tracks.
There it was.
With mood lighting.
Jaws on floor, we screeched into the same car-park vantage point we'd used on the way out. We weren't alone; there was a whole line of photographers with tripods and generally professional-looking equipment, doing long-time exposures. We didn't use a tripod, but my camera has automatic shake compensation and I'd found that I could abuse it and still get good results, with images still in focus even at 1/2 second exposure, so I took shots anyway. Mike steadied his on rocks and other available surfaces. I'd have done that but my batteries chose this time to finish their usual slow death.
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Eilean Donan Castle with mood lighting (71 KB; Mike's photo). None of mine came out worth mentioning, but Mike got one that was quite good. |
So, onward, into what turned into a fairly hellish drive. I'd had a completely unrealistic concept of how long it would take to get to Fort William, let alone Oban, and of course the whole drive was in the dark and we were already tired. We called the B&B at about 10:30 to say don't wait up for us, we still have a long way to go, probably won't get there until around midnight; just leave us instructions. We finally got to Oban at about 1:00 in the morning, at which point ensued a fun game of Find The B&B. Our host's cheery directions to follow the main road through town, turn right on the Esplanade, and they'd be "right there", turned out to be woefully oversimplistic and somewhat difficult to match to the reality of multiple roundabouts and a one-way system. We even stopped and asked at a hotel whose reservations desk was still open, but they said that with so many B&Bs in town they couldn't begin to guess where ours might be, but they did suggest a possible general section of the street (and confirm that the road we were on was indeed the elusive Esplanade). Finally--ha ha!--there it was! And there was great rejoicing and self-congratulating as we pulled into the crowded car park, more than ready to collapse. It was now about 1:30. Long day!
Hmm. Front door's locked. Must have forgotten to leave it open.
We hated to do it but we had no choice; we rang the buzzer.
A bleary-eyed fellow came and answered the door. We explained who we were and apologised for having to ring the bell, but the door had been locked, you see.
"I don't know how to tell you this," he began, "but we've sold the room to someone else!"
WHAT?!
...WHAT!!
We were later than we'd said, you see. It got to be past midnight, you see. We hadn't given a credit card number to hold the room, you see. He was terribly sorry but how could they have known?
We suggested, with (I thought) remarkable civility that if they wanted credit card numbers to hold rooms, they might try asking for them, as we'd have been happy to give one. Or two, or however many they liked, really.
So, 1:30 in the morning, in a seaside resort in which we already know that the B&Bs are fully booked. We can't very well start calling around again at 1:30 in the morning! We were desperately tired already, but all I could think of was pressing on all the way to Helen's--a good long way south. Mike was in favour of sleeping in the car right in their @#$%! car park. This seemed like the most reasonable option, but I was quite sure we wouldn't sleep very well that way, and wake up still far too dead to make the rest of the drive. Then Mike had an insanely optimistic idea. That hotel reservations desk we'd asked directions at...They were a proper hotel. Statistically speaking, they'd almost have to have had some no-shows themselves, right? Certainly worth a try.
Astonishingly, amazingly, blissfully, wonderfully, they did. Actually they had two. The nice lady asked which one I wanted.
"Gosh, I don't know. Is there a price difference?"
"No."
"Is there a difference in the rooms themselves?"
"No, they're comparable."
"Erm. Whichever...Can you just choose one for us?"
She said that I looked like I'd had a hard day and would we like tea?
I told her I thought I'd been happy a few seconds earlier!
So. Park the car. Bring the stuff in. Up to the room. Drop off the stuff. Back to the reception area. Grab the magically-appearing tray of tea. Scarper back to the room.
Tea. Pillow. Bliss.
Saturday (11 August)
As long as we were in the area anyway, we visited a very strange dam, Cruachan Power Station, a short way east of Oban. Essentially they've made an artificial reservoir well up in the mountains, tunneled down through the mountains, and put a power station in between. The tunnels are vast. The tour was impressive, although it was very much a group thing--join a group, get on a bus, follow the tour guide around, go where you're told. The tour guide was amusing, though; he knew every statistic there was to know about the dam, and shared them all, I think.
From there it was really just a straight shot to Helen's. The first half of the drive was still on A-roads, but when we got down to the Glasgow area, we joined our first motorway since way back in Edinburgh. We were as out of place as aborigines; after all, we'd been on almost exclusively single-track roads for a week. We kept looking for sheep in the roadway.
Yet again the drive took far longer than I'd expected. Getting properly underway around lunchtime, we finally arrived at Helen's at about 6:00. Astonishing. Good thing we didn't try to press on last night, after all! Someday I'll get the hang of these travel times. And then I'll visit the US, and arrive everywhere four hours early.
One more time, it poured on a day when we were driving anyway. Oh yes, and I forgot to mention, the last time I'd been called by work, they told me that it had been absolutely tipping it down in Manchester all week, while we'd been getting sunburns and scoffing cream teas at Flodigarry. Somehow that makes it all just that much more enjoyable, even retrospectively.
We passed quite a convivial evening at Helen's; Mike's mum and Arnie were there visiting for the weekend, so we did the obligatory photo-showing, somewhat easier in our case since there's no film to be developed. We especially had fun showing the Skye pictures, because apparently Mike's mum and Kevin have both been there before, under somewhat more normal weather conditions. Kevin flat denied that those pictures could possibly be from Uig, because Uig isn't a place with blue sky and a harbour like glass, it's a place where you drive the truck down these steep, far-too-narrow single-track roads and you couldn't say whether it's cloudy because it's raining too hard to see, and it's bitterly cold and you bash your finger with a really heavy piece of iron.
Must have been some other Uig, I guess.
Anyway, much wine and cider and things were had, and we both got a bit tipsy, and then finally headed sleepwards quite late, quite reluctant to end the day because we knew...
Sunday (12 August)
...that once we did so, holiday would be Officially Over.
Breakfast, jump in the car, simple straightforward drive home (mostly remembering not to look for sheep on the motorway this time).
And, 1700 photos later...home.
Finis.
Created at 16:50
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I find it very hard to conceal my contempt...no, contempt isn't the right word exactly...to conceal my mixture of distress, anger, pity and revulsion at the huge industry of the paranormal, and the irrational mélange of mystery and pseudo-science that is attached to it. On the one hand astrologers and similar charlatans tell us that 'science doesn't know everything; there are more things in heaven and earth, sucker, than are dreamt of in your philosophy' and on the other, they hasten to assure us that their fatuous cabalistic charts are worked out in accordance with scrupulous scientific principles...
--Stephen Fry, Paperweight
Oh dear. Laundry to do. Vast quantities of junk mail. Rubbish to put out. Dishes left undone. What can it all mean? Why--we must have just got home from holiday! Indeed we are back, 1869 miles later, which doesn't sound like much until you realise how many of those miles were on single-track country lanes...
It's almost unreal to be here. I'm not sure whether the house seems strangely unfamiliar, or whether it feels as if I only imagined we were ever gone. (The garden certainly looks as if we were.) But two weeks is a long time to be away. It'll be good to be home and relax in comfortable surroundings, and to go back to work.
Yeah, riiiiiight!
I didn't, as it turned out, manage to do any diary entries while we were away--there was surprisingly little just-relaxing-and-lying-around time--but I did stop to take notes at a few points, so I think I'll retroactively create diary entries from those notes. Therefore if you're seeing this as a current entry for today, there are probably two or three earlier entries that have just been posted and never were current entries. There might even be photos!
Right. I'd better get started, then...
(Much later...)
Hmm, it's now Monday. I think I'll post this bit, because I'm only about half-done with writing up the retroactive entries, and what with being back at work, it may take a bit longer before they are ready. I'll post the one complete entry I have, which you can find at 31 July.
Meanwhile, mixed reviews of the first day back at work. Much of it was wasted on a meeting, and most of the rest was wasted troubleshooting a new type of problem with the Exchange/GroupWise Gateway. So much to do...
Created at 23:12
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Not a very good start to the day, it has to be said. When I went out to the car this morning, the left wing mirror was smashed--the housing was lying in pieces in the road, and the mirror itself, although still hanging on, was broken and bent and basically unuseable. Normally I could ignore this sort of thing for at least a week or two, but I have a feeling that they would look askance at the absence of a working wing mirror when I go for my driving test next Monday. Aha, bet you didn't remember I had the driving test scheduled for Monday. Good thing I remember, anyway.
So I called the dealership and asked about bringing it in for service, and they said they couldn't take it before the middle of next week. Yipe! But when I explained the situation, they said, "Oh, just a broken mirror? You can bring that in any time and we'll put a new one on." I have no idea why a servicing needs to be scheduled and a mirror replacement doesn't. In fact I bet Mike that a broken mirror housing wouldn't be something the dealership would handle at all, that they'd tell us to go to a body shop, because I'm pretty sure that's how the division would work in the US. I can't see my old Honda dealer doing work on the outside of the car. Apparently they do it here, though, which worked out well for me although I did have to leave work at 3:00 to get it done, which obviously I'd have preferred not to have to do with things being just a tad busy at the moment. But at any rate, we now have two brand new wing mirrors. (I also had the driver's-side mirror replaced; it's had a partly-broken housing since we bought it, but not broken enough to be unuseable.)
All of which reminds me of something that happened at the very beginning of our holiday, but I had forgotten. We packed up the car, bounced merrily out the front door, got in the car, slammed the doors, buckled up...erm, buckled up...Hey, my seat belt buckle isn't working! The passenger's-side seat belt receptacle was obstructed or stuck, and wouldn't take the buckle. Well, at least it wasn't the driver's side! I got into the back seat, and we set off anyway while I called the car dealership on the off chance that their service department might be open on a Saturday. Which they weren't, but oh well. Once we got to Mike's mother's, Mike had a look at it and found a small bit of broken plastic jammed in the receptacle. He fished it out, and we were back in business.
On which topic, I'm posting my second retroactive diary entry tonight; you can find it at 4 August.
Created at 23:28
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By now my Texans must be here, hanging out at their hotel and trying to get over their jet lag. I've been told that they don't intend to go into the office tomorrow, that they plan to have an official Jet Lag Recovery Day, but I doubt it; they'll get bored.
Ready or not, here we come. This is going to be the sloppiest, hastiest, messiest migration you ever saw. Of course the first thing to happen will be that I'll have to have it out with them, because they won't agree with my way of doing it (or, more accurately, they won't think we have a right to have our own way of doing it). Something to look forward to.
I suspect the next two weeks will be really unpleasant. I have my driving test tomorrow, just to kick it all off in good style. It'd be wonderful if the Texans really did stay away from the office tomorrow; otherwise they'll have a day there without me, which means they'll do things their way regardless of what we want, or maybe spend the day tinkering with my stuff.
I prefer to put a good face on things, but adjustment to the new job is coming slowly. There's a lot of stress. It's not the stress of having too much to do; I have no trouble with that. It's political stress, which to me seems so stupid and pointless that it just makes it all that much more annoying to have to deal with it. The basic problem is that, because the UK part of the company was taken over by the US part of the company, the US calls the shots. This is fine, except that they don't take us into account; we just get directives saying Do This, even when This isn't possible or sensible (or legal) here. I'm sure it's not entirely intentional on their part to treat us like a colony; it's partly due to simple space and time considerations. They're all in neighbouring offices and can have a casual hallway chat to make a decision about how things will be done. They don't involve us because we're just plain not there, and we're six hours ahead of them so we've probably gone home, and they don't want to wait till tomorrow just to ask us what we think. So we never work together, which also doesn't help because they never have a chance to decide that we might possibly have a clue, so they have no reason to value or seek our opinions.
So what do I do when they hand down a decision that I disagree with? As I see it, I have three choices:
Obviously each of these choices has its own kind of stress associated with it. The really frustrating thing is that there is no reason for it ever to get better. We're never going to solve the time difference problem. They're never going to bother involving us. Some of my co-workers have been putting up with this for a couple of years now. I honestly don't know how they do it.
I have no idea why they hired me. They were looking for someone with lots of experience with GroupWise and NetWare, but what they really need is just someone to serve as a pair of malleable hands at the other end of the phone. Plus they keep doing my job for me. First they show up for my very first two weeks and set up the network infrastructure for me; now they're coming for another two weeks to do a whole chunk of the actual user migration for us. These decisions, to send people to "help" us, get made with no say on our side, not even as to when they'll show up.
My stress level is therefore a bit high just at the moment, so I don't have much spare stress capacity; I fill up quickly. Unfortunately it turns out that a lot of my self-esteem comes from a sense of competence, especially at work. I'm not getting any such sense at the moment, so my self-esteem is suffering. It's very easy to get into a mental loop that ends up with me not liking myself very much. I'm basically not fit company for humans these days; I'm hyper-sensitive and insecure. All of which is loads of fun.
(Heh. Mike's Amplay happens to be playing the lines "Poor mistreated me" at the moment. Never forget to laugh at yourself.)
Which all probably sounds a lot more terrible than it actually is; I'm still in an overall positive frame of mind. I just don't have a resolution for this work problem at the moment, that's all. Probably, when on Tuesday or so they start feeling confrontational and belligerent about the things we want to do differently, we'll just have it out in a conference room. With any luck that'll lead to a resolution I can live with.
Meanwhile, I've finished another instalment of the retroactive holiday diary entries; you can find it at 9 August. I promise it's more upbeat than this entry.
Oh yes, and we spent a solid two hours washing the car today. You wouldn't believe the crud that had built up on it. It's amazing to stand there with a hose trained on a particular crevice of the car, watching these clots of black gunge come dribbling out for as long as you care to point the hose there.
Created at 00:03
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I think I'll let this speak for itself (88 KB)... |
Not only that, but wonderful Mike came home today with a surprise: tickets to a Terrorvision concert in September!
Created at 22:28
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| Copyright © 2001 Lisa Nelson. | Last Modified: 12 August 2001 | Back to Top |