Stranraer is a gritty, seedy, fun little port town with three charity shops :] Cassidy and I had a good time ransacking them after escorting Maria to a pharmacy so she could pick up a few missing supplies, and then a suitcase shop so she’d have a place to put them.

We didn’t so much blast out of Stranraer as meander at a leisurely pace. Everyone was still recovering from the early Irish start and the late ceilidh night. Harry was feeling much better but marriage is a special kind of sharing; Andrea was now not feeling 100%.

That didn’t stop her from loving the day, though. Alan-the-singing-bus-driver took us to Alloway to see the Burns Museum, and suggested making an unscheduled additional stop at KelvinHall, a big free museum of history and art in Glasgow. (And yes we did a verse of The Bleacher Lass of KelvinHaugh. We couldn’t help it.)

Jack and I told what is probably Burns’ most famous story, Tam O’Shanter, on the van in preparation for visiting the museum. You can walk between the museum exhibits and Burns’ family cottage through a sculpture garden lined with famous statues from his poems. You mostly have to guess which pertains to what poem, although Tam O’Shanter is set out in eight delightful weather vanes.

For those unfamiliar, you can read this comedic masterpiece of a story poem in full here, but the short version is a guy stays too long at the pub and on the way home interrupts a group of witches dancing in a graveyard. The devil is, of course, playing the bagpipes for the dance. Tam is so impressed with one of the dancers, a young redhead wearing only a short dress (and there’s a very funny bit in the poem about what her grandmother who so lovingly sewed the garment would think if she saw her granddaughter now) that he can’t contain himself and shouts out “Weel Done Cutty Sark!” (translation: Hey, you in the short dress, great dance moves)

And in an instant all was dark…..

Everyone with a lick of common sense knows witches and ghosts can’t cross running water, so Tam leaps onto his horse and they run for the bridge. So does redhead Cutty, and she manages to grab the horse’s tail and pull it off just as Tam and steed reach the bridge’s center stone and safety.

My two favorite lines from the poem are Tam’s wife Kate “waiting at home, nursing her wrath to keep it warm” and his description of some items on the witches’ party table, including “Three priests‘ hearts, rotten, black as muck, Lay stinking, vile in every neuk.”

The bridge about which the poem is written is in the town. Gareth and I were the only ones who walked over through the sculpture garden, taking the requisite silly photos as we went. Since neither of us were desperate to tour the rather crowded cottage, he bought us a pot of tea and we relaxed until the others were ready, chatting amiably about nothing in particular and his life as a farmer-not-all-that-into-farming.

Off to Kelvin Hall, and a very brief hello from one of my favorite people, Alan’s wife Mary. She had her wee granddaughter asleep on her shoulder, so just a swift visit, and then Andrea and I went in search of fine china in the museum. That was Andrea’s first introduction to the story of the Glencoe Massacre. We would be visiting the actual site tomorrow.

The next part of the trip was kind of a Jack indulgence. We drove along an amazing road called the Rest and Be Thankful. The words REST & BE THANKFUL were inscribed on a stone by soldiers who built the original military road in 1753. (This has been updated recently, since the original one finally fell apart.) It’s called the Rest and Be Thankful because after the climb out of nearby Glen Croe (a glen is a valley, and this is Croe not Coe) travellers would stop to rest at the top, thankful for having reached the highest point. The views from that high point are some of the best we’ve ever seen in Scotland—and that’s saying something, given how beautiful Scotland’s abundant mountains are.

The destination of this road for us was Inveraray, a tiny town with a big story. Jack and I both love the World Pipe Band Championships, and our favorite was in 2017, when little Inveraray won against massive multi-champion powerhouses like the Simon Frazier and the Field Marshal Montgomery bands, etc. It’s sort of like if Coeburn had beat Charlottesville for Best Music Festival, for you Virginians reading this. Or if the Ozarks bested NYC for literary capital.

Replete with victory, the band sought a parade permit for a triumphal town entry—and were turned down by the local council. So they paraded anyway, right through the main street, with the police politely looking the other way and parking their cars across traffic. The band marched to the town hall, surrounded it, and played for another hour.

The Inveraray hotel had neither Victorian nor modern elevators, and I knew it was a sign that Andrea wasn’t feeling well when she let me help lug their luggage up two flights of stairs. A restorative dinner helped, as there was sticky toffee pudding on the menu again. Also, I raided the SPAR shop next door for a round of Beecham’s Pills (good for whatever ails you) and began passing them out to the team.

One more fun fact about the Inveraray Inn: it had great artwork on the walls. Including this mysterious portrait that I swear is my friend Lynn Davis. Look for yourself. I texted her and she declined to explain how it came to be hanging there but implied the story was worth a couple of beers when next we were together.

Cassidy was the only one with energy to watch the sunset (which, remember is about 1 am) over the harbor. The rest of us let the seaside air lull us to sleep. And that was the fifth day.