Europe 2013: Sitting on a BeachAugust 14, 2013
I am, at this moment, sitting on a small, flinty beach on Loch Lomond. I'm on my meandering way up to Oban for lack of a better destination. This beach is covered in perfectly flat skipping stones, and I am powerfully transported back to my youth, with my brother David, skipping rocks out over the inland waters of Vancouver Island. We would compete to see who could get the most skips, or who could make the longest first jump. I'm not doing too well on the multiple-skip contest right now, since the wind is a bit too strong, and the waves a bit too big to make for ideal rock-skipping conditions. I'm a strong contender in the long first-jump trials, though. When I arrived on Scottish soil, I was unreasonably happy. Just being back here was a huge deal -- it's been almost 20 years since I was last here, and that year I spent in Edinburgh was a pretty good one. It had its ups and downs to be sure, but I look back on it very fondly. This all makes it surprisingly hard to know what to do here. The Festival is on in Edinburgh, so visiting there would be crowded and frustrating (although I would really like to see the city again, and re-trace some of my old footsteps). I will certainly stay at Glenuig, where Brooke (my girlfriend at the time) and I stayed on our Easter trip around the Highlands. It's arguably a bit less romantic with just me, myself and I, but I still want to visit again. In a way, that area forms the landscape of the fairyland I put into Sight, my novel, where I sent the main character to a Scottish Highlands version of fairyland. I'd like to take a bunch of scenery pictures with that in mind, if nothing else.
In any case, when I woke up this morning, I really didn't know what I wanted to do. Glenuig is the only firm goal I have in Scotland, but I want to retrace our footsteps from that Easter trip to some extent. I want to recapture the feelings the scenery and country inspired in me. I want to visit Pictish symbol stones, and standing stone circles, and visit the cities and places we went (within reason). But I don't know how to find any of those things at the moment. I don't have any guidebooks, and wifi is hard to come by, and even when I have it, I can only plan so far ahead before I lose track of what I want to be looking up. I guess my next step is to hit Oban, maybe find a bookstore or a tourist office (I want to avoid picking up books, since they're so bulky, and I have very limited space available; maybe I can find a pamphlet, or a map to the stone sites or something). ---- After my beach sojourn, I did indeed stop into the next tourist center I came across. They had no such thing, but I also realized I need to check the touring map I picked up after the ferry, to see if it lists such things (how convenient if it did; ps: it does). After the tourist center, I had a surprisingly good smoked mackerel salad at the place next door, where I parked among a bevvy of old BMW motorcycles with German licence plates. I found them in the restaurant, but they didn't seem interested in talking except amongst themselves, so I let them be.
Finding internet access is proving to be really difficult, without simply paying for it (usually at very steep rates). For instance, I'm at the Oban Camping and Caravan site right now, and they claimed to have wifi, and gave me the password, but it doesn't work. And of course the office is closed so there's no one to ask about it. A gent just came by (I'm sitting in the laundry, watching my wash go around -- don't judge, there's a chair, and it's warm and dry) saying that I had the wrong network, and he's offered to come back with the name of the right one. That would be fancy. In any case, the point stands: you don't just plonk down in any old place and access the free wifi with lunch. Anyway, enough with the troubles. I was pondering on motorcycling today, as I was (wait for it) riding along, and reflecting how very true is the training I've gotten. The worst possible way to go through a turn is coasting or on the brakes, with your arms stiff in fear (not that I'm doing this, but I am having some exciting moments coming around left-hand turns where I simply don't know what's 100 feet in front of me). It's really best to be accelerating through the curve, arms loose, having a good time. The bike settles down, and counterintuitively, it's actually easier to tighten up your line when you're adding a bit of power (not a ton, just enough to settle things down: the training I've had suggests about .1g of acceleration). In order to pull this off, you need to set you entry speed correctly, which has proven to be the challenging part. Scotland is a bit better than Ireland, with slightly more predictable curve radii and no surprise 30 km/h curves.
Some of the road markings are quite interesting, speaking of roads. In Ireland, I noticed obviously that most of the signs were both in Gaelic and English. The major exception to that was the words painted on the road: typically the word SLOW, really. Although it would occasionally be followed by SLOWER (reminding me of the advice my dad received while exiting from the Autobahn: "Slow down. Good. Now slow down again," the first "slow" having taken him to a mere 60 MPH). From the signs, I know that the Irish Gaelic for SLOW is "Go mall," but that never appared on the pavement. In Ireland, the speed limits are in km/h (and my bike's odometer is in km, so I'm leaving my world set to km for the moment), and they're always explicitly called out: 40, 60, 80, 100, 120. In Northern Ireland and Scotland, however, slow speeds are called out explicitly, but the "normal speed limit" isn't. There's just a sign indicating "no more speed restriction." This would be fine and dandy if I had any idea what that speed limit is. I don't think it's 60, since I've seen the occasional explicit 60 sign. I keep forgetting to ask when I'm talking to a native. (I'm sitting across the drive from the TV room, and I just heard a huge collective groan -- someone just missed a goal or something in the football game they're all watching.)
The hilarious thing about speed limits in Ireland was this common occurrence, in this order:
Although I guess you could technically and legally go 100 at any point, it would be suicide to do so on many of the roads. It looks like my gent with the wifi network name now can't see it either, so we theorize that despite the assurances of the reception guy to my friend, the network is not in fact available over night (whether that's intentional or not is a different question). I think I'm going to leave this until the morning, and hopefully get multiple messages off. This may be the way these things work: store up pictures and text until I can find a working wifi point, then send them all at once. I mean, that was the plan all along, I just figured I'd be running into wifi points more often. Enough from me for today. I'm showered and clean and my laundry's nearly washed, so life is generally looking up. Now if it would just stop raining long enough for the tent and my riding suit to dry out. I did certainly know what I was signing up for, though. Postscript: the wifi did indeed come back in the morning, so I'll be able to send out a few updates and I have downloaded some maps of Pictish symbol stone locations. I also found many of them on my touring map (although not all of them, compared to the map I downloaded). I think the goal today is Glenuig.
Return to the Europe 2013 page Created by Ian Johnston. Questions? Please mail me at reaper at obairlann dot net. | ||||||||||||||||
