Somebody back East is say’n why don’t she write…….

Well; it has been a while since my last post.  I have received mountains of cards and letters asking me where I have been and why I haven’t written. Kind of like that scene in Dances With Wolves where LT Dunbar finds the skeleton on the prairie impaled with an arrow. There has been a small problem; fickstravels.com sorta blew up this past spring. Probably related to something called “operator error” whatever that means.  I knew I could fix the problem if I flipped a couple more switches and purchased more plugins from the site host for a couple of hundred dollars.  Needless to say, that did not help but I now own cool plugins.  I then hired a company that assured me they had the answer to my problems for a few hundred dollars; not so much. Next up, I found the contact info of the person that helped me the last time my site crashed and abracadabra!  The site is up only seven months later and I am not much smarter.  I’ll try hard to watch out for that “operator error” thing in the future.

The Princess and I have been very busy globe-trotting this summer.  Against my better judgment, we found ourselves in Scotland again.  You may recall that we were there a few years ago. Took the train around the country visiting three of the larger cities and a few castles. Had a good time but taking the train was too easy. This time I wanted to try my hand at purposely driving on the wrong side of the road.  I am here to say, I handled the challenge just as you would expect me to. I never cried but did sweat a lot and only remember closing my eyes once.   I was cool as a cucumber but the Princess got a little excited and used a few bad words.  That was just getting out of the rental lot at the airport.  There are very few stop lights in Scotland but there are a lot of roundabouts. Who would have thought one had to drive the wrong way around a roundabout? It did not get fun till we got on the A9. Unlike in the States, people there drive a little fast and take umbrage with a tourist that drives just a bit below the minimum posted speed.  By the third day, most people stopped honking and gesturing at us.  Piece of cake.

Our first stop was at a small town, but wait I am getting ahead of the story.  Actually, our first stop after leaving St Louis was two nights in NYC.  The idea was to give us a time cushion in case the first leg of our flight was late or canceled. There was a lot of that going on back then.  The stopover was well used.  We saw a play, Dear Evan Hansen. (Can’t recommend it, too much teenage angst.) The next day we visited the 9/11 Memorial. (A wonderful experience) Later we had a very good dinner at an Italian restaurant named Eataly.  A serious first-time event for us, we took Uber to get around the city and used the subway where we did not die. All was good until we reached JFK. OMG as the youngsters would say.  The check-in was terrible. Lines were everywhere; we stood in lines only to be told later that we were in the wrong line. Got to love flying.

Now, back to the first stop in Scotland. Arriving at our lodging, which looked nothing like the photographs online when I booked, we were told that we didn’t have a reservation. I handed the new owner an email from the last owner that indicated that we did have a room booked for four nights.  The person insisted that there were no rooms available but would try to find lodging for us in town. We lucked out, the Waverly was a very nice place two blocks away for about the same price. Turned out fine.

We used our base in Callander to explore the surrounding area and to further enjoy many relaxing drives. A funny interesting side note here is that our room had very large windows. On the first morning there the sky had cleared from the previous night’s rain; the sky was a beautiful blue.  I opened the curtains to let the natural light in.  The Princess, walking into the room from her shower, admonished me to close $%&@ curtains.  I insisted that with the direction of the sunlight, no one from the street below could see into the darker interior of our room. She relented, walking over to her suitcase on the floor underneath the window just in time to come eye to eye with the window washer that surprisingly appeared. Both Sherrie and the window washer guy were a little startled. She closed the curtains.  I wondered if he would recognize the Princess if they later passed on the street.

While staying in Callander Sherrie insisted that we visit the Loch Lomond area. This was a must-stop for Sherrie. It seems that Loch Lomond is the namesake of her elementary school back in Ohio and she did not want to pass up the chance to say that she was there.  A guidebook said that the best views of the loch were from the top of Conic Hill.  An easy hike of less than an hour.   The first part of the hike in the parking lot was easy then got a lot harder. Steep, rocky, and in places boggy but the view was worth the effort.

*If you would be so kind as to look at the center photo on the top row, there are bonus points if you know what the object is standing in front of the huge fireplace.

On another day we toured Stirling Castle. A short harrowing drive away on Scotland’s idea of a two-lane road.  Surprisingly the castle is in Stirling, with construction starting in the later part of the 1400s and completed in the 1600s by King James IV.  The buildings and grounds have gone through a major renovation recreating the interiors to be as close as possible to what King James had enjoyed.  Some of the original tapestries in the Queen’s Inner Hall were lost and others are in museums around the world.  The recreations on display were woven on site by West Dean Tapestry Studio over 12 years.  At the time of King James, each of the original seven tapestries is said to have cost the same as the amount to build a battleship.  The series of tapestries feature the hunt, death, and resurrection of a white unicorn. Does that remind you of a similar story you may have heard?

Next to the Castle is the Church of the Holy Rude.  Rude in this case does not refer to an obnoxious parishioner but rather the Holy Cross.   The original church was destroyed by fire in 1405 and rebuilt over the next 90 years.  An interesting dispute between clergy in 1650 resulted in a congregational split. It appears that neither group wanted to give up the building so they built a wall across the middle.  This wall remained to separate the groups for 200 hundred years and has since been removed.  This story almost makes me wish I had stayed awake in all of the history classes in school.

After Callander, we moved on to Oban.  For you scotch drinkers out there, yes it was “that” Oban.

Dennis

*To answer the question about the object in front of the fireplace at Stirling Castle, it is a shield designed to keep the heat from the fireplace from melting the makeup on the lady of the house while she was seated there.