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Day 5: It’s not such a long way to Inveraray….

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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.

Pig, Towel, Goose: GO!

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Sorry about yesterday. My presence was required at multiple events in town, usually hefting luggage and smiling. Let’s pick up with our heroes’ adventures today, shall we?

After a hearty breakfast at Liz’s place we meandered down through the Irish back roads to the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum. (Think Williamsburg, but Irish.) Andrea loved the gardens, Maria loved the church, Cassidy loved the sweet shop, and Mr. Fox loved the farm.

Mr. Fox, I should say, picked up his very own fox puppet at the ginormous Giant’s Causeway gift shop the day before. The little guy fit perfectly on his paw, and when I passed them on the Folk Museum grounds, Mr. Fox and Zahnke party of three were enjoying the sights tremendously, with Mr Fox-the-puppet’s wee fox puppet making erudite comments.

Maria and I also passed a man walking alone in a blue sweatshirt emblazoned with a school logo. Schools in Scotland require uniforms (public or private). He asked if we had seen “the blue uniform school children” and we pointed him in the right direction. He thanked us and walked the other way. Don’t judge; teaching is a difficult profession.

Andrea and I spent a great deal of time sorting through linen dishtowels at the Folk Museum shop, trying to parse statements like “conceptually designed in Scotland manufactured in Indonesia.” After spending the morning learning how people harvest and weave flax, we were looking for something a little more… local? Although I understand the age-old dilemma between local quality goods and prices tourists will pay: you can’t sell authentic stuff at bulk prices. It’s an omnipresent problem in cultural heritage.

I bought my dad a plastic Rubik’s Cube with multicolored sheep on it, made in China. C’est la vie.

As a chair caner, I had to check out the basket weaver’s place, where we found a sweet story waiting. The big goose in the center of the caning area was made by the basket weaver in honor of one of the Folk Museum’s volunteers, a guy whose nickname and life symbol was a goose. The volunteer had spent more than twenty years working with the museum.

And of course, who can resist trying on a mummer’s mask shaped like a pig? When I was doing my PhD in Newfoundland, people would show up with masks while doing the traditional holiday mummering (when you go house to house dressed up in disguise and play music and dance; think Christmas caroling with a Halloween twist). But none were as cool as this pig.

The Transport Museum is a separate building, built in a huge spiral, and just as we pulled in so did about six busloads of school children. After about an hour even Mr. Fox–who was thoroughly enjoying the day out–had seen enough of trains, planes, and automobiles–not to mention small children in school uniforms. But where were Lulu and Fiona? We had a ferry to catch.

The mystery was made more perplexing because Mr. Fox and his fox puppet were safely in the van. Gareth tried texting his aunt and grandmother, but no answer.

I went in search of them, and found them trying to hurry up a path blocked by six busloads of schoolchildren being paired up by their minders after having been told to use the toilets before the buses drove them home.

Since Fiona and Lulu had also wanted to use the toilet, and the occupancy rate at the museum gift shop was one child per square inch, they had been directed to the toilets at the bottom of the spiral ramp, three stories down, where the classic cars were kept. Fifteen minutes down, fifteen minutes up.

We made the ferry with a few minutes to spare, and ate dinner back at the Stranraer hotel of the Victorian elevator. Actually, I forgot one of the funny stories about this elevator from our first day in Stranraer, before we went over to Liz’s ceilidh barn. When we arrived, the staff handed out keys and pointed us to the wee lift. What we didn’t grasp, or they failed to tell us, was that the room numbers starting with 4 were not on the fourth floor. There was no fourth floor. The 400s rooms were evenly divided across a recently renovated wing of the hotel, 401-409 on the second floor, 410-419 on the third floor.

Complicating these numbers is that Scotland numbers its floors differently: when you get into an elevator, you will see G, 1, 2, etc. This translates in American to G=1, 1=2, 2=3. So if you ask if something is on the first floor, the staff will respond, “No, Madam, on the ground floor.” Which is always good for a couple of “who’s on first” kind of routines, Scots style.

But because the elevator at this hotel was tiny, we shoved Fiona, Lulu, and Gareth into it with their luggage and sent them unaccompanied to look for rooms 409 and 412. As the hotel had an influx of other guests arriving, I was lining the luggage up for our next team of the Meadors and Maria to get into the elevator, when the doors opened and I saw Lulu, Fiona, and Gareth still in it, arguing. Fiona was saying “But there isn’t a fourth floor, they must have given us the wrong keys” and Lulu was saying “if I get out and ask at the desk we’ll lose the elevator” and Gareth was staring straight out the elevator door with a glassy expression and then the doors closed again.

A minute later they opened, revealing the Zahnke women engaged in a lively discussion of what the hell was going on here. Gareth had removed his hat and was resting one elbow on the stack of luggage.

All’s well as ends well. We had supper, and fell into our respective beds in rooms on the third and fourth floor of the hotel, labeled second and third floors, bearing numbers in the 400s. And there was sleep by 9 pm. Americans abroad: we know how to party.