On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Today is the beginning of a new adventure in Scotland. With Albatrossity! To me, it seems kind of expensive to travel to Scotland every Monday for 7 weeks, only to return home again by Tuesday morning, but then what do I know? ?♀️
At least we will have Albatrossity in Scotland as a Monday morning pick-me-up that will take us through the election! After that, it will be a whole new world in every way, but one thing we can count on is On The Road. In the meantime, today I feel like the bird in the last photo!
Oh, and a quick reminder to start thinking of ideas about where to go next in the evenings, because we will be discussing that this week in On The Road After Dark.
~WaterGirl
Albatrossity
Another trip and pics from the past, this one to Scotland in summer of 2008.
Elizabeth had an invited presentation to give at a conference in Aberdeen, and I had always wanted to get to Scotland, since it is my ancestral homeland on my paternal side. My great-grandfather, with whom I share a first name, emigrated from Scotland in the mid-19th century, and I wanted to see the land that he grew up in. We were successful in that quest, but that story will have to wait until the final post in this series! So we planned a 2-week trip around these parameters, and also included as many ancient stone structures and bird-watching sites as possible.
Upon landing at Edinburgh airport in mid-morning, we got a rental car and got out of the big city, heading toward the Highlands. Navigating that first traffic circle in an unfamiliar vehicle, while groggy from an overnight trip and while adjusting to driving on the wrong side of the road, was an experience I hope not to repeat anytime soon.
Our first stop was at a village named Bridge of Orchy, where we wandered around a bit to see the sights. Lots of new birds, including this gorgeous male Chaffinch sunning himself in a sheltered spot out of the wind.
Speaking of wind, these wispy flowers belong to a member of the sedge family, Eriophorum gracile, or slender cottongrass. This flower was abundant along the stream that flowed near our hotel.
The stream also had some nice wide places, probably good fishing holes for the locals!
This young Wren (Troglodytes troglodytes) was also bouncing along beside the stream, following a parent bird who mostly was letting it fend for itself. There are many species of wren in the Western Hemisphere (I’ve had three species in my yard here in Kansas!), but this is the only species from that large family that is found in Eurasia and Africa. In Anglophone Europe, it is known simply as “the wren”. It was formerly lumped with one of the North American species, the Winter Wren, but phylogenetic analyses changed that, and indicate that these two species last shared a common ancestor about 4.3 million years ago.
The next day we drove across the Highlands, heading for a bridge to take us to the Isle of Skye. On the far side of Skye we were scheduled to catch a ferry that evening that would take us to South Uist, our starting point for our time in the Outer Hebrides. Here is some of the scenery along the way. It was so captivating that we failed to notice that our GPS device was not heading toward the bridge. We ended up at a ferry terminal, and by then it was too late to backtrack and get to the bridge in time to catch our evening ferry from Skye. Fortunately there was room on this ferry for ourselves and our vehicle, or we would have been very sad travelers. Memo to self – check where your GPS thinks you want to end up.
After a not-so-relaxing drive across Skye, we ended up at another ferry terminal in the town of Uig. We had time to wander along the shore, and this Grey Seal was very curious about us, or perhaps it just was hoping that we were anglers and would toss a fish or two in its direction.
Our ferry trip that evening was marked by some loud and uncomfortable interactions with a local loonie, who figured out that we were North American tourists and proceeded to bellow insults about the president and the USA in our general direction. He eventually moved off when some of the other passengers told him to shut up. We landed in the Outer Hebrides and drove the short distance to our guest house, Sgeir Ruadh, near the Balranald Nature Preserve, a famous birding site on the Atlantic shore of North Uist. The next morning, after a lovely breakfast, this is what we saw from the front lawn of the guest house. It looked more like the Caribbean than the North Atlantic! But no worries, soon it was raining.
I got my first life bird of the trip at Balranald, this Corn Bunting. It was, of course, raining intermittently, but it was still a lovely place to be on a July morning.
p.a.
Great stuff. Scottish isles, July. Rain gear. Did you need wool sweaters? Hit any roundabouts? They gotta be ‘fun’ when you’re driving on the left side.
OzarkHillbilly
Always a pleasure Albatrossity.
Rob
Lovely!
evodevo
“Upon landing at Edinburgh airport in mid-morning, we got a rental car and got out of the big city, heading toward the Highlands. Navigating that first traffic circle in an unfamiliar vehicle, while groggy from an overnight trip and while adjusting to driving on the wrong side of the road, was an experience I hope not to repeat anytime soon. ”
Yes…been there, done that in ’01 in LONDON – really freaky. Like to NEVER got off that first traffic circle lol
Love the pics…
Sloane Ranger
No, its the rest of the world that drives on the wrong side of the road. WE drive on the side God intended! :)
Seriously, those are some lovely pictures.Takes me back to holidays in Scotland with my father many years ago. Are we going to see any Highland cattle?
Albatrossity
@Sloane Ranger: Yes, the rest of the world is wrong about which side of the road one should drive on. Just like the rest of the world is wrong about the metric system, and the USA is right. Not!
We did see Highland cattle in a few places, but there will be no pics of those in this series. One pic of a Scottish Blackface ram will show up, however. We certainly saw lots more sheep than cattle, especially in the Outer Hebrides.
Princess Leia
So needed this on this mad Monday- thank you, Albatrossity!!
Wag
Excellent photos!
MelissaM
So lovely!
frosty
I didn’t want to deal with wrong-side driving so we didn’t rent a vehicle in London. After disembarking from the Eurostar and renting a van, while trying to find the route out of town I found myself negotiating a traffic circle in Paris … the Place de la Concorde!!!
wormtown
beautiful. Thank you. I am looking forward to a time when we all can travel once more.
Spanky
@evodevo:
Yeah, I was going to say this was EXACTLY our experience landing at Heathrow and driving west. I think every Heathrow rental car has to hit that first roundabout.
Spanky
Speaking of THE wren …
et cetera.
arrieve
Scotland is one of the most magical places on the planet so this made me very happy this morning. I will make it to the Outer Hebrides some day, dammit!
And yes, I have occasionally been checking prices for flats in Edinburgh. Just in case.
montanareddog
@Albatrossity:
Fighting talk! To which I would respond that ~1/4 of the world’s countries and ~1/3 of its population are LHT (mostly former British colonies but also including Japan and Indonesia, for example) so “rest of the world” is a bit overstated.
There are multiple theories as to which is functionally preferable. I have always been amenable to the argument that since it is traditional to mount a bicycle, motorbike, or horse from the left, and to walk a horse from the left, LHT is safer since it allows the person to do this from the kerb-side and not the traffic-side.
Benw
Awesome! Seals are the coolest
Betty
@montanareddog: It is not right v. wrong; it is rightv. left.
Origuy
I should put together a set or two of my Scotland pictures. I have one or two of Highland coos. No birds, though, not even a puffin. The roundabouts can be tricky; they have signs posted before you get to them showing which exit leads where. In the Highlands these are labeled in both English and Gaelic. There’s one on the edge of Oban that’s nearly the size of a billboard.
The picture of the wren made me think of the poem that Spanky posted. There’s a tradition of catching a wren on St Stephen’s Day (Dec 26) and taking it around the village. The wren was a symbol of the old year passing. It’s a very old Celtic tradition.
Albatrossity
Yes, road signs in the Hebrides are interesting too. If you had a roundabout you would have to circle it three times just to read the names of the villages and figure out your next move. For example, we stayed near a village called Hogha Gearraidh, Na h-Eileanan an Iar. It was also known as Houghharry, and pronounced Hoo-gar-ee (I think)
J R in WV
When wife and I and a couple we have been friends with for 45 years traveled to Firenze aka Florence and Tuscany in Italy, we had both my tablet with Google maps and the Nav system in the rental car, a diesel BMW SUV. We missed the entrance to the southbound expressway at the airport, and tried following it south, seeking an on ramp — no good.
Finally I drove back to the airport, where we knew there was an on ramp. Everything went well after that to our rural former vineyard hotel and back to Firenze. Then the navigation to the downtown medieval location of our urban hotel failed repeatedly, we wound up at the same stop with 5 potential directions to try. over and over.
So I started just trying the next possibility, and eventually the nav system said “You have arrived” even tho we saw no sign of the high end hotel. Driving in a literally medieval city was interesting, narrow streets with modern buses driving around. Vehicles had beepers for both directions, because tourists ignored everything around them!
Was frustrating, eventually we got checked in, found the downtown rental return location in a big parking deck, and got a cab back to the hotel.
We stuck to cabs for the rest of the visit to Italy, which was a wonderful place to visit.
I will NEVER attempt to drive in an area with driving on the left, can barely stand to ride in such a place!!! Was sure we were going to die any second now !!