Here I am again, sleep-starved in the early morning, typing. This is becoming habit-forming, with a twist. This time I have the luxury of a laptop, not an iPhone, and I’m in one of the three departure gates at the small but not notably tiny Inverness airport. In one hour we depart for Dublin, at which point the 18 pounds, 21 pence in the pocket of my Levis will become worthless. Not worthless like everyone we’ve met over the past three weeks has insisted it’s become since Brexit but actually worthless as in “not of any value as tender.”
Again this journal is a full day behind, so let me get you caught up.
Yesterday was DAY TWO of our Skye Island adventure. It dawned cloudy and threatening (in enormous contrast to the Arizona-like atmosphere of our room) as I walked the mean streets of Portree (population: “around 2,000” — George) looking for the seasickness cure that would ease my fears about the afternoon’s ferry ride. I’m no stranger to ferries and do actually go out of my way to schedule a ferry trip whenever we’re in the great Pacific Northwest, but on DAY ONE, as we sat on the side of Sir Ian Noble’s mountain and watched the sheep, I noticed in the distance a sea teeming with whitecaps. As I already sensed that George was beginning to notice that the other male in his car was not the most manly fellow — I was short one stint in military intelligence, three motorcycles, an equal number of bicycles, one pizza oven and a love for shops whose selection features an abundance of tools — I was hoping to avoid spending the ferry ride on my knees in the head, praying to the porcelain god of mal de mer and confirming to George that in case of emergency he’d be the one fighting off the mongol hordes as I cowered like Bonnie Prince Charlie in the back. Unfortunately, the Boots pharmacy was closed. Double unfortunately, on my way back to the hotel I ran into a chipper George, who’d already been out taking pictures. I confessed. He chuckled. “It’s not a long trip.” I was suspicious.
Though the day was marked by on-and-off rain squalls, DAY TWO delivered as grandly as DAY ONE. We never ended up on the side of a mountain, but we did start off at the Faerie Pools, a very popular four-mile hike (Sandra Bullock and I in appropriate clothing; George in his tie. Did I mention that George is 67 years old and sometimes, when his Land Rover Defender needs work, drives to the repair shop and then rides his mountain bike the 25 miles home? Uphill?) whose revealed beauty, both S. B. and I later admitted, was a bit tempered by its midge infestation.
What is a midge? There are comparable pests in the U.S. — gnats, no-see-ums — but they don’t bite. The midge on Skye, who bites often and with great enthusiasm is a prominent beast, a large part of local lore. Later, at Annandale Castle (one-time HQ of the MacDonald clan) gift shop, I saw a display of children’s books featuring a highland cow, an anthropomorphic haggis and yes, a talking midge.
As we pulled into the car park, George tossed a bottle of SMIDGE into the back seat. “We’ll need loads of this,” he said. Interesting. Then we noticed that the woman in charge of the car park was wearing mosquito netting. Her daughter had taken the SMIDGE, she explained. George rolled down the window to talk to her. Midges immediately swarmed into the car. From the back seat, Sandra Bullock and I began madly applying SMIDGE in oceanic quantities.
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| Not pictured: midges |
The hike itself was epic. Nobody had a heart attack, unlike some poor guy last week, who was “gone before he hit the water (in the Faerie Pools)” per our be-netted parking attendant. Everyone was bothered by the midges but nobody turned back. Instead, the trail was full with tourists swatting at their faces, alternately making cracks about the midges and George’s tie as we passed. Also a few “mermaids,” people for whom “the Scottish experience,” one explained to us as we gawked, was incomplete without a quick dip in a Faerie Pool. The view was, of course, spectacular. But we’d gotten used to that.
On the way down, Sandra Bullock pointed at my forearms. I’d already acknowledged a midge in my right eye and a few in my mouth, but hadn’t realized that my exposed arms and legs had become midge burial grounds. Each limb was dotted with tiny carcasses. It was grim but as always, worth it. A little midge vengeance doesn’t feel terrible, too.
It began to rain as we drove across the island toward the ferry, stopping first at a tiny whiskey distillery where we could not ship bottles to the U.S. so instead bought little airline-sized bottles of a blended whiskey whose name I could not pronounce if you put a gun to my head. It tasted pretty good, I mean, as good as someone who knows zippo about whisky can tell. Then we stopped at Annandale Castle, which is in ruins because the MacDonald’s, “Lords of the Isles,” gave up on it in the early 1900s after generations of fighting off their hated rivals whose clan name I wish I could remember. Mac-something.
At this point the scene on Skye Island resembled Washington State so strongly that I fully expected the ferryboat Yakima to float toward the tiny island dock. It did not. In its place came a tall, narrow boat with a surprising amount of three-across seating in its three-deck passenger lounge. As we crossed the Straight of Sleet (sp?), Sandra Bullock and George huddled on the top deck, watching minke whales and harbor porpoises (pronounced por-POISE) frolic in the rain. I was still wearing shorts at this point, and freezing, so after a day of insisting to George that, while I was unable to participate in all of the manly joys he found so workaday, I was at least plagued with a hot furnace and burned so brightly that I would wear shorts in a downpour I ended up sitting alone in the passenger lounge, secretly eating a bag of crisps I bought from the ferry’s lone vending machine.
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| Some Harry Potter viaduct thing. |
After lunch at an adorable converted rail car in Glen Finnan, we joined legions of Harry Potter fans at the visitor’s center and hiked in the now light rain to see a train trestle that is of great importance if you’re a Harry Potter fan. If not, it’s just a really cool-looking train trestle, especially if you’re a fan of dramatic cloud formations and rain, which I am.
Poor Bonnie Prince Charlie. His reputation is already dubious (I personally found myself torn between thinking he was an insouciant hotshot hero and a snotty, spoiled rich kid coward; imagine if a large part of your regional history depended on this guy?), enough so that George felt it necessary to point out that the Bonnie Prince Charlie statue planted at the foot of the ocean in Glen Finnan was actually intended to honor any old Highland soldier. And now, at least in Glen Finnan, where the Jacobite train apparently resembles the one that carried wizards-to-be to Hogwarts, whatever credibility he did have as a Scottish hero has been all but supplanted by Harry Freaking Potter, a fictional character.
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| Waterfall, sans midges. |
The rain continued, but the hiking was not complete. Late in the day, after a disturbing period where Sandra Bullock could not keep her eyes open, leaving me alone to pepper George with questions about flora and fauna, her subsequent re-awakening and a run to George’s village, where we (finally) saw a bunch of highland cows and red deer (worth it), then sat back and relaxed as George regaled us with tales of his controversial speech at last January’s Burns Night festivities, we parked in a small village and climbed down to Foyer Falls (I think that’s the name), a peaceful, dramatically wooded canyon thankfully and gloriously free of midges. “How did you know there’d be no midges?” Sandra Bullock asked George off-handedly.
“I guessed.”
George dropped us at the still-sweltering-despite-the-cool-weather Pentahotel, where I was “rude” to the desk clerk because I didn’t smile and say “that’s okay” when told there were no fans available. This turned out to be fake news it was later confirmed when, after a delightful evening of pizza and Black Isle beers with the Crown Prince of Plate Glass and his Sun Devils, head Sun Devil Janelle strongly suggested “I would’ve demanded a free night” if similarly confronted with a blithe desk clerk offering no fans.
And here we are, awaiting our flight to Dublin at 7:28 AM, pockets full of useless money, devices running low on juice. I think I’ll close here and gird myself for the terrifying reality that in about two hours I’ll be driving a car on the wrong side of the road. Per the CP of PG, you just have to “follow the guy in front of you.” I’ll keep that in mind.
Here’s today’s/yesterday’s numbers:
2 — hours it takes to properly heat up a pizza oven like the one George bought on the urging of his nieces.
3 — gates at the Inverness airport
60,000 — estimated attendees at the annual Rock Ness music festival. George worked the Red Cross volunteer tent last year. Most of the festival goers visiting the tent came for sunburn. George sent them on their way. They just wanted free creams.
0 “really cute” t-shirts with a small cartoon highland cow silkscreened on them purchased by S. Bullock, because there’s “no room in my bag.”
4 — guys bringing motorcycles onto the ferry, despite the day’s inclement weather. The Scots are a hearty bunch.
64 — midges who came to my forearms for an easy meal and found death instead.
1 — mirror taken out by a mini collision between RVs driving on a narrow road leading to downtown Portree. Both drivers continued on as if nothing had happened.
too many — Harry Potter souvenirs at the Glen Finnan visitors center.
They just called our flight. See you in Galway.
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