Author: P.J. Gardner

After breakfast in the big hotel in Strathpeffer, we made a quick getaway. We were on the road by about 9:30 AM, much earlier than usual.

We drove down Loch Ness in more rain to Urquhart Castle, a picturesque ruin that has dominated the shores of the lake for centuries. It was so freeing to use our Historic Scotland passes to breeze past the line and enter the visitor’s center without having to pay again.  First we watched an excellent film for an overview. Then we walked around the ruins reading all the signs, interrupting our explorations for a guided tour by a history buff who just couldn’t give us enough detail to make himself happy. By the time we were finished, I felt we had been quite thorough and hadn’t missed anything.

Next, we drove through Inverness, which looks like a nice city, to the battlefield of Culloden, where Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites lost to the British, and the traditional highland way of life basically came to an end. At first we thought we would just walk around the battlefield, but with the rain and all, we decided to buy passes for the visitor’s center.  I am glad we did.  The visitor’s center is well done, with both the British and the Jacobite points of view. I especially liked the enacted audio tapes using contemporary quotations to bring the lead-up to the battle to life.

But best of all was a short immersive 360-degree presentation that puts you in the middle and brings the battle to life all around you.  When you experience how quickly it took the well-disciplined British to annihilate the passionate Jacobite army, it can break your heart. Especially when you realize that Bonnie Prince Charlie ran away afterwards and hid for a couple of years before returning to Italy, where he was born.

After the visitor’s center circuit, we headed outside to the moor to view the clan stones and cairns to the fallen. I found it quite moving, especially in the light rain and somber light of the afternoon.

After leaving the battlefield, we drove south through Cairngorms National Park, the largest park in Scotland, the scenery again reminding us of the highland views near Glencoe, with the mountaintops in the clouds, and bright yellow gorse bushes and sheep everywhere. What is probably heather is still dark brown at this time of year, but it must be gorgeous when it is in full bloom. Scottish houses tend to stand alone in the countryside, with slate roofs, flower-pot chimneys, and white-washed stone walls, visible for miles in the bright green glens.

We are staying in the little town of Pitlochry in the quaint East Haugh House Hotel, with its stone walls and turret tower. What a difference from last night! The Michelin recommendation on the door says it all. The dinner we had tonight was the best of the trip so far.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Today, for the first time on this vacation, we woke to a steady rain, just in time to leave our cute little vacation cottage, where we have had nothing but sunshine for six straight days.

Driving past Loch Lubnaig again, this time with rain and misty mountaintops, gave us a sense of what this country really looks like and how different it was in the sunshine.

As we drove north, we were most impressed with the highland scenery around Glencoe, where steep green mountainsides, totally bare of trees, rise up until they disappear into the clouds. They seem much taller and more imposing than mountains of greater heights we know in New England, mostly because of how steep they are. The rain and fog only made them all the more impressive.

Taking pictures in the rain and as we were driving was very difficult. Also difficult was trying to take pictures of Loch Ness, once we reached it, because, being long and thin, there were few good vantage points in the direction we were traveling. Better luck tomorrow.

Our destination for the next two nights was Strathpeffer, a golfing resort town slightly northwest of Inverness. Arjan thought it would make a good jumping off point for heading in any direction.  But our hotel turned out to be a total disaster.  Our first clue was that the whole downstairs lobby area was filled with crowds of people over 80 who had just gotten off their tour bus and were waiting in line for dinner.

The hotel was one of those places that thoroughly insulates you from the local culture of the place you are visiting.  That thought was clinched by the stuffed Nessies (the Loch Ness Monster) in the display case next to the reception desk. Later, when we came back from dinner (elsewhere!), a man in a kilt was singing Muzak about Scotland to the crowd that filled the entire downstairs lounge and lined up at the bar to buy more drinks.

The idea of staying here for two nights was so repulsive, we conned our way out of a second night and booked another place much further south for tomorrow night.  We can now alter our itinerary to visit the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness and the battlefield of Culloden just outside of Inverness tomorrow. We will miss the northern Highlands this trip, but we will make it easier to return to Edinburgh for our flight on Tuesday.  With constant rain predicted for the foreseeable future, it makes sense to keep things simple.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Today we used our Historic Scotland Explorer passes to visit Stirling Castle, home of the Stewart Kings of Scotland. The car park was full, but we managed to find a parking spot on the far side of the castle where we parked for free all afternoon! All we had to do was walk up a short, steep incline, and there we were at the gates of the castle!

It is easy to see why this castle played such an important part in the history of Scotland. It is nearly impregnable, with a commanding view of the countryside in every direction. The castle is definitely worth visiting, and there is so much to see. We absorbed a historic timeline in the Castle Exhibition and then joined a guided tour with a kilted guide to learn about the physical layout and more historic detail. Finally, we explored more nooks and crannies on our own, especially in the Palace, with its costumed characters and a recreation of the colorful interior during the reign of King James V, its architect. There were short films, signboards, and displays everywhere. The visitor is well taken care of, no matter how little or how deeply you want to delve.

After Arjan’s emergency dental appointment, which went amazingly smoothly, we came back to our bungalow.  I took my camera and walked out to the road to take more pictures of the surrounding area, because we leave tomorrow.  If you squint, you can even see Stirling Castle off in the distance!

We had dinner again at L’Angolino’s in Doune. No, it is not our imagination, the food is just as good as our first impression, and the owners, Gerry and Kitty, were just as friendly as last time.  Definitely a place to remember for the hospitality of the area.

It is sad to leave our hosts, Fiona and Colin, and our lovely little cottage, but there are more adventures to be had further north!

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

The scenery here in the District of Stirling is very lovely—green farmland, with sheep and cows everywhere, along with hedgerows and stone walls with capped tops. There is a photograph at every turn along these winding country roads, but the roads have no shoulders and are extremely narrow, so there is never a place to stop and point my camera. I do the best I can and photograph everything in sight every time the car stops and I can get onto my own two feet! Arjan has the tense job of negotiating these tiny byways and avoiding the cars whizzing from the other direction “on the wrong side of the road,” as Americans like to say.

We are also on a fault line, between the rolling fields of the south and the higher mountains of The Trossachs area.  In fact, the national park is often called, “The Highlands in Miniature.”

For the record, in case you want to follow along on the map (or I do after we get home), the first day here, we did the mini loop of the Trossachs Trail from Callander, past Loch Venachar to Loch Katrine, and then over Duke’s Pass to Aberfoyle and back home through the little village of Thornhill, our neighboring town.

The second day, we made the big loop around the park, from Callander to Crianlarich, past Loch Lubnaig and Loch Iubhair. Then we turned south, stopping at the Falls of Falloch, and past all the Munros (mountains over 3000 feet), including the imposing Ben More at 1174 metres. At the northern-most point of Loch Lomand, we stopped for a bite at the Hotel Ardlui, and then headed down the full 24-miles of the loch on the western side to Balloch. On the way home, we stopped at the Port of Menteith and back to Thornhill.

Today, we drove directly to Drymen and Balmaha at the southern end of Loch Lomand and drove up the east side of the loch as far as the road can take us to Rowardennan, where the hikers take off for Ben Lomand, the highest peak in the area at 974 metres. We returned to Balmaha for a mini walk of our own, called the Millennium Forest Path, more suitable for people nearing their own millennium.

It has been a real pleasure to be able to experience this part of Scotland in the sunshine every day. Only two more days here and we head north into the Highlands, where it is reasonable to expect more typical gloomy weather.

NOTE: Apologies for the delay in posting photographs, but vacation time is being taken up with vacationing. The accompanying photographs will appear in due time. Know that they are being taken.

Arjan has done it again! He found us a marvelous place to stay for the next five days in Scotland—a bungalow called “The Garden Studio” in Doune, Stirlingshire, about halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Doune (pronounced “dune”) is a tiny town, most famous for its medieval Doune Castle.

We are centrally located near Stirling (site of another famous castle) and the Trossachs National Park, which includes Loch Lomand. (More about those places when we have actually visited them!)

In the meantime, I want to praise our lodgings. The owners, Fiona and Colin Graham, have set up the little cottage perfectly. It is very cozy and beautifully arranged, and everything we might need has already been thought of.  The little house is tucked behind their house, at the end of a driveway you couldn’t find unless you knew it was here.  We have the ultimate in privacy and convenience, and a wonderful place to relax and stay put for a while.

Outside our windows is an old stone fence and rolling green farmlands, with mountains that appear out of nowhere in the afternoon sun. Speaking of sunshine, we have had two days of cloudless skies and temperatures in the 70s Farenheit (above 21 degrees Celsius). Hard to believe that we have brought our travel weather gods with us once again. Even if it turns cloudy or even rainy over the next few days, we have been blessed with absolutely perfect weather to get settled into our little haven.

Today, we took a long time to get started, enjoying the precious sunshine on our porch and streaming in through the windows.  We finally dragged ourselves away to go sightseeing around 3:00 PM.  Luckily, the sun doesn’t go down until around 10:00 PM, so we had plenty of sunshine to drive a portion of the Trossachs Trail, a scenic loop around the National Park, and take a walk near Loch Katrine.

Dinner will be at the Lion & Unicorn in Thornhill, a nearby pub that sent us away last night because they were mobbed. Last night, we ended up eating at L’Angolino’s in Doune just before closing. Every other place we tried turned us away! While waiting for our table, we took a stroll around the neighborhood and actually stumbled across Doune Castle after the tourists had all gone home for the night.

Photographs © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Today’s job was traveling from London to Edinburgh by train.

The transfer from the hotel to King’s Cross station and onto the train was pretty smooth. But just before the train left, in comes a family of four, two adults and two small children (ages four and two), to occupy the seats across the table from us designed for two people. We were riding backwards facing them. The family was from Argentina (the husband originally from Australia). They turned out to be very nice, except for the usual noise children make and the little girl kicking me whenever she was sitting on her father’s lap. The children were entirely bilingual in both Spanish and English, and extremely charming.

The parents felt a bit guilty, so they made it up to us by lending me a converter for my laptop cord and giving us the free Wi-Fi codes they had obtained good for the entire trip.  (Standard fares are usually limited to only 15 minutes of free Wi-Fi.)

I must admit that I was so distracted by all the activity across the table that I did not pay as much attention to the scenery as I wanted to.  Around York, we passed a lot of neat, green farmland a lot like Holland and Belgium.  Later we passed the gorgeous town of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on the shores of the North Sea, and lots of castle ruins.

Edinburgh is a revelation.  The immediate impression is of massive amounts of brown stone and towering heights.  The history of the place is vividly evident everywhere, and I want to spend a lot more time here exploring the place and taking photographs.  The shortest way out of the train station to where we were staying is a most intimidating stairway that climbs straight up and up.  Instead, we dragged our bags the long way around the corner and up the incline onto Cockburn Street.

Our hotel is a huge improvement over the previous two nights—totally modern and much larger, but inside a building as old as the rest of the city. After spending some time settling in and recuperating from the sense of always being on the move, we hiked up to the next corner and the famous Royal Mile, the wide boulevard that climbs still higher to the imposing Edinburgh Castle at the top, checking out restaurants along the way.  Somehow the buildings retain their sense of history despite the modern-day tourism at their feet. There are churches and statues everywhere, along with taverns and pubs, stores selling argyle and tweed, street musicians, bagpipes, tour groups, and rowdies yelling to each other down the street.

So with all the choices of places to eat, do we go with Scottish fare or choose something more familiar?  We will be in Scotland for another ten days or so, so we chose Gordon’s Trattoria, for traditional Italian food and a most charming Scottish waiter who really knows how to charm the tourists.

I love this city. It is really unique among the cities we have visited, and I can’t wait to come back to experience it some more.  We leave tomorrow for our Scottish rental, but we have some unplanned time in Scotland, so we just have to come back.

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.

Since I work in the field of web accessibility, I am constantly aware of accessibility issues, online or otherwise.  My experiences before my knee surgery also made me much more aware when there is a lack of accommodation.  Traveling around a city with two rolling bags behind me this time reminds me to recognize all the places it might be hard for people to access who have special needs—and that includes people with suitcases, strollers, or kids.

Unfortunately, the London Underground has a long way to go.  First of all, there are long escalators and flights of stairs everywhere to bring you deep down to the bomb-proof level of the tube trains, with no elevators in sight. And long circuitous routes between the platforms for various directions and train changes. But the biggest problem is that there is the ever-present “gap” between the trains and the edge of the platform.  Sometimes it is only a small gap of a couple of inches, but sometimes, in stations that have a curve, the gap can be more than a foot to jump over.  Not only that, there is often a big step down from the train to the platform.

The percentage of accessible stations is much smaller than in Boston. The tube maps even have to differentiate between accessible stations that provide full access from the train to the street, and those that are only accessible from the platform to the street.  What good does that do?

Navigating with suitcases reminds me of the troubles someone using a scooter or a wheelchair might experience. The paddles that close behind you at the ticket machines actually caught my suitcase at one point, and a station guard had to come along with a key to release me.

Our hotel was also ridiculous, with tiny, narrow staircases up and down levels that you can’t even negotiate with a large suitcase, much less with a mobility impairment of any kind.  And no handrails or ramps anywhere. Our room was so tiny, there was no place I could stand where I could not touch the wall!

Let’s not even mention London’s famous double-decker buses, as beautiful as they are. In Boston, the buses can “kneel” for senior citizens and people who need special help.

Boston is doing much better.  Probably to do with the Americans with Disabilities Act. There is much more thought and much more accommodation for various abilities than in the ancient city of London.

After weeks of agonizing about how to pack for a 50-day trip involving plane, train, bus, rental car, and cruise travel, we have finally arrived in London. We are staying in a small hotel near King’s Cross and St. Pancras station.

Today’s trip went amazingly well. Despite dire predictions about long delays at TSA security, we breezed through without a line.  The British Airways flight was smooth, and we even arrived a bit early.  Good thing, though, because it took quite a bit of time to get through customs. There were both European and non-European lines. Arjan’s line was much longer, but he got through much faster. My line got stalled until they called in extra help and increased the open lines from four to about a dozen.

The new Heathrow Terminal 5 is really beautiful, and we had no trouble taking the Underground to get to central London.

We don’t have jet lag, thanks to a daytime flight, but we are both very tired from a poor night’s sleep anticipating our trip.  Now that we are here, can we relax yet?

Photograph © 2016 P.J. Gardner. All rights reserved.