DAY EIGHT: Lerwick, Shetland Islands

Last year, my summer was ruined when our downstairs remodel project stalled, thanks to a combination of incompetent architects who don't know how to navigate the San Francisco permitting process and incompetent architects who don't respond to phone calls and emails about them not knowing how to navigate the San Francisco permitting process.  Every day at least once I'd walk downstairs and gaze at the muddy cave our basement had become, vowing to find a way to ruin those architects forever.  Today I learned that there's no way I would've survived the Iron Age.

On this day our Shetland Mini Bus Tour (with guide Grant Redfern) included a long stop at Jarlshof settlement in Sumbergh, where you can view 5,000 years of Shetland Islands settlement all at once, at least until the entire thing becomes a UNESCO site very soon, at which point, says Grant, you will only be able to "stand there and point."

How fortunate we were to arrive before that happened, because as of right now you can walk through 5,000 years' worth of ruins, including a series of Iron Age wheelhouses and brochs, where several families would cram into tiny chambers surrounding a central fire pit.  If I were one of them, I probably wouldn't have been happy, because I wouldn't have had the patience to painstakingly gather a bunch of stones (no trees on the Shetland Islands) and then carefully pile them on top of each other until they form walls.  I would've been emailing people after the first month when I realized that we'd only gathered enough stones to make a wall-and-a-half.  How long must this have taken?

We know that it took 50-some years to make the Cathedral in Durham, and that was in the 16h century.  How long did these wheelhouses and brochs take?  This is 1800 years ago, pre-vikings but lets not assume those vikings didn't eventually show up and build their own settlements in this very spot, because they did.  And if you think they did so after first beheading everyone and taking their gold, you'd only be partially right.  Sometimes they came in and stole guys' wives, which was easy, Grant said, because they were very clean and attractive, tall and blonde, which made me shudder because I know how much danger my carefully constructed life would be in were Alexander Skarsgard to suddenly show up at my door and ask for my gold and my wife. 

Piles of rocks. 

The vikings built long houses in the same spot.  Today we got to see what's left of them, which was pretty cool, and we got to see a falling-down mini-castle built by Earl Patrick Stewart, who not only never piloted the Starship Enterprise but was, per Grant, "a pretty bad guy," who enslaved people, forcing them to build houses for him all over the place, only to eventually fall victim to William Bruce, whose family eventually built a much more modern place in the 19th century, discovered all of this stuff on their land and turned over the whole lot to the Scottish government, who created Jarishof.  And if you think that name sounds more Scandanavian than Scottish, you're onto something.  This whole place was once owned by Denmark before being unceremoniously -- or perhaps very ceremoniously -- included as a dowry when daughter of the prevailing king in 1469 married a Scottish guy whose name, I'm sorry, I can't remember.  It's been a day of lots of facts.  You can't expect to retain all of them.

There were the ruins.  There were puffins.  (If you want to see puffins, go to Sandra Bullock's Facebook page.  Okay, fine.  I'll post a picture of a puffin.  Puffins are pretty i

Daredevil puffins

rresistible.  Especially daredevil puffins that next on the sides of very steep cliffs with frigid waters hundreds of feet below)  There was a 19th-century home turned into a museum that resembled no 19th-century home I'd ever seen and spun me out into thinking about income inequity and how the differences between city living and rural living were once way huger than they are now.  I mean, these people lived hard, gathering huge piles of peat to heat their tiny homes, cramming 12 people into two rooms (plus one room for the cows), sleeping three and four to a bed, hanging out all winter in there, breathing in peat smoke, changing the roof out every two or three years when it starts leaking.  Meanwhile in San Francisco, Mark Twain is living at the Palace Hotel.  And 800 years earlier, as the vikings are beheading people for the pleasure of living in a circle made of rocks, William the Conquerer is building the White Tower in London, where the master bedroom has an en-suite bathrooms and its own chapel.

There were sea lions, protected from orcas by a shallow inlet.  There was a lighthouse that played an important part in foiling a Nazi attack during World War II.  There was the ruins of

Rare, fogless vista.

an old chapel on an island connected to the mainland by a narrow beach and not discovered until 1958.  There was fog.  All kinds of fog.  Too much fog to see anything at several planned dramatic vista points.  "If it wasn't foggy, you could see an incredible view," said Grant more than once, whipping out his cracked iPhone to show us what we'd be seeing were we not staring into a wall of white that was actually quite similar to the one usually hiding the Golden Gate Bridge from view when we bring visitors to take a look. 

There was lunch with excellent tomato and lentil soup.  There were people from Poland and the English guy who'd married their cousin.  There were Australians.  There was us.

Even better, there were suggestions of restaurants, which should help us avoid a semi-fiasco like last night, when we charged forth from our hotel full of excitement and confidence, only to find ourselves eating bad chips/french fries in an overlit chip shop whose greatest asset was being open to the public.  "Yeah, everything's closed on Monday," said Grant, leading me to think I'd screwed up and should've slotted this trip one day later in the week -- but if I'd done that we would've missed last night's glorious views, because last night there was no fog; only 180 degree vistas that seemed to stretch all the way to Denmark, locals out for relaxing evening walks and a guy nailing the green on the pitch-and-putt over and over with his wedge. 

Fortunately, there wasn't Teddy and his three siblings, though for awhile this morning it looked like they'd be our curse.  They blew into breakfast at 8:19, which I thought was comical until Sandra Bullock looked at me with dead eyes and said, "I'll bet they're on our tour today."

"No."

She just nodded.

I felt a chill come over me.  It got worse 20 minutes later when I heard them charge down the hall outside our room.  8:39.  Plenty of time to be ready for our 9 AM pickup.  At 8:50 we went upstairs to wait.  I'm not a man of faith, but what I was doing might be considered praying.  For nothing.  Five minutes later, the four kids, all in K-Way jackets just like mine only smaller, burst into the lobby, trailed by their hapless grandmother.  "We just have to stay calm and work through it," Sandra Bullock said quietly, flashing an annoying amount of positive thinking.

I just sat there, watching.  This is some sort of sign, I told myself.  If we have to get through this, eight hours of Teddy whining "I want iPad," after I'd written in this very place yesterday that his voice "could peel paint," well, that's obviously no mistake, right?  It's karma, or something.  Along with 124 pounds ($138 US) wasted on what was going to be an enjoyable tour.  

Their mother blew in at nine, stylish in a pair of old school Vans and said, breezily, "Maybe we should walk to town.  Get some fresh air."

The relief was overwhelming.  All I could do was turn to my wife and say, "Thank you Baby Jesus in your tiny crib."

How about some numbers for today?

2 -- times we drove over the runway at Sumburgh Airport.  It's part of the road.  A red light flashes if a plane is coming. 

3,639,006 -- sheep.  Most are indifferent, but a few will eye you as you pass.  

3 -- times we ran across the guys from the chip shop last night.  "There's your friends," Grant quipped the second time.

4 -- children in Teddy's family, the exact number required to torpedo a murmuring European hotel breakfast scene in less than 30 seconds.

57 -- Shetland ponies.

8 -- minutes of sleep sneakily copped by me after Sandra Bullock and I switched to the very back row of seats in the van and I finally got a window seat.

166 -- times I thought the phrase "I'm Arthur, King of the Britons" while at Jarlshof Prehistoric Settlement.  How I managed to never say it out loud is anyone's guess. 

1 -- number of days I was off when I scheduled our tour of the Lerwick Brewery.  That was supposed to be for tomorrow, not today.  Oops.

Speaking of tomorrow, after our (rescheduled) brewery tour we get back on a tiny airplane, hopefully this time minus Teddy's family, and fly to Edinburgh, where we will spend an entire week without leaving and will be joined by Sandra Bullock's mom, late of Lake Chelan, Washington, where she lives an idyllic existence with her husband, the ex-Boeing employee.  Ex-Boeing is unfortunately laid up at home, so we get mom solo, but that doesn't mean we've tempered our quest to delve into his Scottish roots -- as well as hers; more on that later.