Altered Eyes

My hope for any trip is that I return home with altered eyes. How has Scotland altered them? 

It's made me an even more confirmed walker — or perhaps I should say hiker — than I was before. The boots I considered not bringing were just about the only footwear I wore. So many of Scotland's riches are best seen on foot. We covered as many of them as we could, given the miles not just on the boots but on the old bod. 

There was the antiquity. The Neolithic stones of Orkney, the Roman ruins in the Border Lands. The ancient stones of Edinburgh Castle. All of them put us in our place, which is puny.

And then there were the sights, sounds, sensibilities of any European country. Traffic is calmer, people not as stressed. American life is a high-octane, jangly affair these days. I'm thankful we could dip our toes into calmer waters for a few weeks. 

I'm sure there will be more observations to come, but these are few to start ...

(A road beckons on the Isle of Skye)

D Day

The D stands for departure, but reminds me of the Churchill barriers of Orkney, a tale I had no time to tell in these posts, so rich were these travels, so packed with information, perspective and fun.

The tales will continue when we return home. But for now, the actual, physical part of this trip must come to an end.

We leave for the airport in less than an hour.

(Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat)

Auld Reekie

Before there was clean(ish) indoor heating, before Edinburgh's medieval old town became a tourist mecca, Scotland's capital city earned the nickname Auld Reekie, Gaelic for "Old Smokey."

There were so many people crammed into such a small space, and so many chimneys belching so much smoke. It's hard to believe the nickname on a day like today, with blue skies and clouds more puffy than forbidding. 

But Auld Reekie it was, and Auld Reekie it has remained — though it's now just a term of endearment. 

(Victoria Street, said to be the inspiration for Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter books.)

Arthur's Seat

 

How can you not love a city with a mountain in the middle of it?  Arthur's Seat rises 823 feet above sea level, rewarding hikers who reach its summit (or close to it) with generous views of land and sea. 

Today's rare clear morning drew people of all ages and climbing levels to the hill. You can see them here, making their final ascent up the extinct volcano. 

Once on top, you could see for miles — park and city and the Firth of Forth. Imagine having these views in your back pocket, there for the taking whenever you have the energy for the climb. 

Castle Rocks

We approached Edinburgh Castle from the rear, which shows to good effect the extinct volcano plug on which it's built. It's mostly sheer rock back there, and the fortress seems to grow from it. Impregnable is the word I would use, though it's the most besieged castle in Scotland.

Now it's tourists attacking the fortress — not Jacobites. 

But if you can find a quiet corner — especially a place like the 12th-century Saint Margarett's Chapel, the oldest building in Edinburgh — you feel the majesty and antiquity of the place. 

 

Roman Stones

We interrupt this regularly scheduled Scottish programming to bring you .... England. Yes, we crept down into "enemy territory" today, joked our tour guide as we headed out on our day trip to Hadrian's Wall in England's far north. 

Built by the Romans about 2,000 years ago, the wall was either a raw display of power or a way to enhance the local economy, depending upon who you listen to.

Whatever its rationale, it's still having an impact two millennia later, though perhaps not the kind originally intended. I wasn't counting on it to protect me from heathens — but to fill me with awe. It did.

 

Force Field

It's August in Edinburgh, and we felt the buzz the moment we stepped off the train. Scotland's capital city has a force field. 

In part it's all the people clogging the street, so many that we could barely snake our way through with our pull bags and backpacks. 

In part it's the festival, the original Edinburgh Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which we sampled this evening.  

And then ... there are the bagpipes.

Return to Inverness

It's the first place we've left and come back to, though only for one night. An early start and late drop-off from our Orkney trip has made Inverness the place to be, and now the place to leave once again.

Still, there's something quite nice about returning to a city, a way to know it better. 

I felt at home here right away, and now, par for the course, I hate to leave.

Hairy Coo

What do you get when you put 16 people and one tour guide into a small van? If you're lucky something like what we had these last three days with Stewart. 

This guy took a random assemblage of humans (albeit some of them related) from three continents and made us into a community with routines, in-jokes and a quest: We had to find a "hairy coo" — a Highland cow — not only for the six-year-old among us but for all the other lovers of these gentle, shaggy beasts. 

Stewart backed up the van and practically drove us into the field where a few of the cattle were grazing. Photos were snapped ... and snapped .... and snapped. It's a testament to these creatures' docile natures that they put up with it all.

As for our tour group, we have scattered to the four winds, to a lot more places than this famous sign at John O'Groats, the northern-most point in mainland Britain.

Neolithic Orkney

Today we traveled in time as well as space, touring sites which Orkadians five millennia ago would have known.

Places like Skara Brae, a Neolithic village uncovered less than 200 years ago and older than Stonehenge or the pyramids in Egypt. The Stones of Stenness rising up from the treeless plain. And the Ring of Brodnar with its 27 menhirs decked out in heather.  

What I took from this jam-packed day is that we have much in common with our Stone Age ancestors, that they, like us, sought shelter from the cold, a good meal, and something beyond creature comforts, a carving on a mace handle, a decorated saucer. 

They too, wanted to say we were here. And today, I saw that they were. 

The Gloup

"It looks like someone stabbed the island with a knife," said Stewart, our guide on this three-day tour of the Orkney Islands. He was referring to this collapsed sea cave known as a gloup. 

The gloup does look like a large earth wound, and the North Sea rushes in from the back end, making it gurgle and growl.  Though it was a warm day for these climes (closer to Norway than London), the temperature of the surrounding water is in the upper 50s. I wouldn't want to fall in.

Stewart was born here, and his grandparents are Orkadians, so he knows the hidden jewels of this faraway place. Tomorrow, he'll show us more of them.

Passageways

Inverness is the capital of the Highlands, but the mountains mostly disappeared as we chugged up to the city by train last evening. 

There are a few hills, but for the most part Inverness is far less "highlandy" than some of the other places we've visited. It sits in the Great Glen, which runs from here to Fort William. It's a natural travel route, a break in the hills, a passageway. 

Today we made our own passageway, touring the city center, exploring the islands in the River Ness (so shallow that if the monster migrated from the loch we would have seen him) and finding out where the Great Glen Way and the Caledonian Canal enter the city. 

If our steps left a wake like the boats we saw in the canal today, you'd see a lot of backtracking. 

Living Large

Four days here, barely enough time to know the Trotternish from the Sleat, the Cuillins from the Quiraing. More time here than most places, but still not nearly enough.

Best to leave when you've plenty left to explore, I tell myself. But at this point, the cool rational part of me knows that return is unlikely. 

Skye is passing from an actual, physical place to a place I keep only in memory. But there too it will live large.

Castles and Gardens

So often on this trip I've wished I could drink up the scenery. It's that scrumptious. Taking a photograph doesn't seem enough. I want to inhale it, to soak it up through my pores. 

And then there are places I want to photograph because they're iconic. Eilean Donan Castle falls into this category. You see pictures of the place in guidebooks and on calendars. So today we drove there, not a short distance I might add. It was lovely, of course — it's a castle in Scotland. 

But then we walked around to the nearby village of Dornie, and I saw the most enchanting garden, and well, that's the place I wanted to inhale today. 

Lighthouse at the End of the World

It's hard to know where to start. Should I write about the heather on the hill? It's in season here in Skye.

Or  the views views off Lealt Gorge with the Inner Hebrides in the distance?

Truth is, I'm seeing far too much during these long luscious days (it's light till almost 10) to encapsulate it in a single post.  So I'll end with what you see up top — the lighthouse at the end of the world. 

Fellow Travelers

This afternoon, on the way to see a rock formation called the Old Man of Storr, we ran into the young people of Aalst, a group of Belgians we met on the way up Ben Nevis. We had run into them later that same day, hiking back from the visitor's center, so this was actually our third meeting. 

It's not the first time on this trip that we've run into people we just met. We sat beside a couple from Philadelphia on the train from Oban and ran into them again near Ben Nevis. And there are others.

Traveling is like that. You meet people you think you'll never see again — and then bump into them the very next day. Fellow travelers can make all the difference. 

A P.S. to this post: we met our Belgian friends again the very next day. 

To Skye, By Ferry

We've only been on this island a few hours but I can already appreciate the aptness of the appellation. A beautiful name for a beautiful place: Skye. 

Mountains rise from the mist. Heather decks the hills. A harbor curves gracefully outside our window. There's an old-fashioned square-rigged schooner parked in the bay. Not sure why, but it seems to fit.

On the way over, dolphins swam by our ferry, leaping and diving, as if to welcome us. Three jumped from the water at once in perfect synchrony.

As the day winds down, a cloud moves over the hill that juts into the loch, creating a perfect replica of itself in shade on the mountainside. 

 

Half a Bag

Adventurous Scots who love to walk enjoy what they call "bagging a munro." A munro is any peak over 3,000 feet. According to Sir Hugh Munro (1856-1919), there are 283 of them.

And according to the Visit Scotland website, there are more than 6,000 people who've hiked them all.

Today we got almost halfway up the tallest Munro — Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles. It was raining when we started but soon cleared up. This was good for many reasons, including the fact that the rocks in our path had dried out when we made our way down, making them slightly less slippery. 

We certainly didn't bag a Munro today. But we almost half-bagged one. 

Kerrera to the Rescue

One of the things I like best about travel is that it shakes you out of your routine. In fact, sometimes it flips you over and turns you upside down. But when it just jostles you a bit, the sensation can be pleasurable.

The main reason we traveled to Oban was to explore the Inner Hebrides. We were excited to see the birthplace of Christianity (Iona) and Fingal's Cave (Staffa). Instead, as soon as we landed I learned that the ferry and boat tour was canceled. Bad weather was moving in. 

After being in Scotland four days, I can safely say that bad weather is always moving in. But good weather is, too. And with Mull, Iona and Staffa out of the picture, we needed an island to explore. 

Kerrera to the rescue! This small island is a five-minute ferry ride from Oban and basically car-free—a walker's paradise. We skirted Horseshoe Bay, lunched at the Kerrera Tea Garden, and marveled at the ruins of Gylen Castle. We met some fascinating people. It was not what we planned to do, but it was just right.

A Window on Oban

I'm sitting in a window seat overlooking Oban Harbor, trying to imagine living in the midst of such beauty. Would you stop noticing it? Would it become just some pretty wallpaper, something you glanced at from time to time while going about your everyday life? 

The two charming rooms in this B&B make me think otherwise. The lady of the house showed us in, laid the key on the low coffee table in front of the window, stood with me just a minute explaining how things work, lingered as if to say, this is something special. 

Because it is, and you feel it the moment you walk in. The window frames a view of shining water, docked fishing boats, and many-chimneyed houses made of no-nonsense stone. But it's a view that depends on the movement of clouds and the angle of the sun, or whether a small ferry or a large one is moving across the waves. It's a view that's always changing, and always lovely.

West Highland Way

The West Highland Way is a 95-mile walking path that runs through some of the most spectacular scenery on the planet. We walked eight miles of it today.

Along the way, we met fellow travelers: a young woman from Germany who raved about the distillery in Oban (where we head tomorrow), a family whose members hail from Canada and Holland but who originally came from Scotland, a couple who lives only 90 minutes away from us in West Virginia but who came here to hike the entire trail ... and many more folks. 

Foot travel invites friendships and confidences. It's the original mode of transportation, and as you might expect, I think it's the best. 

Eternal Glasgow

Glasgow has a modern vibe but an ancient core. It was the core that impressed me most during our wanderings yesterday, especially the cathedral, which dates back to the 13th century. It was the only great Scottish church to survive the Reformation, the guidebook told us.

To see it, even just from the outside (we arrived after it closed for the day), was to be reminded of the stark cold stones of the past, a time when life was more likely to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," in the words of Thomas Hobbes, who I thought for a moment might have been Scottish but was actually British.

Behind the cathedral is the Glasgow necropolis, a romantic burial ground in the Victorian style, with paths meandering among the monuments and a"bridge of sighs" that carries the living to the dead. 

Like the cathedral, the necropolis has a whiff of the eternal about it.

The Order of Things

We've been here only a few hours but the soft accents, warm welcomes, and (what else?!) bagpipes have made us feel right at home. 

Our first two days are in Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, and we're venturing out to explore it soon. This errand has two purposes: to see the sights and to stay awake until we're a wee bit (warning: I plan to use the word "wee" often while here) adjusted to the five-hour time difference. 

We're bunking at the National Piping Center, with its museum dedicated to all things bagpipe — plus a few rooms and a cafe that serves whiskey, tea and a killer tomato-red pepper soup. 

I noticed this sign as we checked in. I like its order of things. At least for today, we're putting sleep last too. 

A Single Step

I live close enough to Dulles Airport that I can hear the planes taking off and landing, especially, I'm sorry to say, when windy or stormy weather requires the use of another runway. 

Until recently, though, the only way to reach the airport was by taxi or by wrangling a ride from a friend or relative. But that has changed recently. Now you can take Metro to Dulles ... provided, of course, you can reach Metro. 

Which is how we came up with this crazy scheme: Today, we'll embark on this journey of (more than) a thousand miles with a single step. We'll walk out of the house and trek about 15 minutes to a bus stop, where we'll board a bus that will take us to Metro, which will take us to the airport.

It seems an appropriate way to begin a trip that will rely almost solely on public transportation. But around here, it will seem pretty crazy. And that's what makes it fun.

Home, for a Minute

Today is the slender filling of home in a very large travel sandwich. Tomorrow we leave for three weeks in Scotland. Was this trip planned by a madwoman? Yes, of course, and that madwoman would be me. 

So yesterday and today it's a flurry of laundry and repacking, of settling in but not settling down, of checking lists and paring them to a sliver of their former selves. 

Tomorrow evening we take off for a country I visited once decades ago and found much to admire: castles and lochs and vistas galore. 

But before that, the dust will be flying. 

Freeze Frame

Back home now, with only a few items missing, and none of them mine (or at least not that I've noticed so far), I think about what this week means to my family, the role it has begun to play. 

The toddlers, two going on three, may actually remember this summer's trip, and if not, they will remember next year's, I hope. The baby had a new place to crawl — actually a couple of new places, if you count the fair. The pre-teen was given a little more freedom. And the adults had a chance to reconnect and have fun. 

The months and years pass, and while this week doesn't completely slow them down, it does freeze-frame them. And that will have to do.  

(What a difference a year makes. Photos by CCG.) 

Rosy Glow

There are stands of ancient hemlocks in New Germany State Park, an oasis of green trails and lofty heights. A cathedral of a forest.

And then... there are the streams, and the late day sunlight slanting on them.

In some spots the light struck the creek at such an angle that it gave the water a strange, rosy glow, as if it were blushing or bleeding. As if it were lit from within.

Vacation Loop

The sign says "End County Maintenance," another way of saying "No Outlet." But from the beginning I was intrigued by a break in the fence, a parting of the trees.

Last year I discovered it, and this year I've enjoyed it: a cut-through path, one that connects our street to the main drag of this neighborhood. 

The cut-through has created a loop walk where I thought there was none. And I've been strolling it this week whenever I can. 

(Not the loop walk but part of a detour, which is a vacation loop of its own.)

Baby Crawl

On your mark, get set, go! And the babies were off and running at the Garrett County Fair Baby Crawl. 

Our entry in the race was a little more interested in socializing with her competitors than she was in winning the race. 

It took the babies in this heat quite a while to reach their moms. One of them was fast asleep and did a face plant on the green mat. As his mother said, the baby crawl was scheduled during morning nap time.  What can you expect?

In and Out

I write to the sound of little voices and big thuds. The house we've rented is one of those shaggy old cottages that spring up around lakes and beaches, perfect for several generations of a family gathering for a week or two in the summer. 

Right now the toddlers and their parents are upstairs, and I've hit the first floor in a rare moment of calm.

The temptation is to be with my kids and their kids every moment, but sometimes, like now, I find myself alone while chaos reigns all around. And in that moment (and sometimes it literally is just a moment), I savor the togetherness ... without being a part of it.