Thanks and good night

       I swear I started this blog as a learning exercise.  My kids have or have had blogs, sheesh, who doesn't? And I figured I ought to know how these things work.  Keep up or get left out.   I didn't do it because I thought I had anything to say that anyone needed to hear.  In fact, I kept reassuring myself that I could, after all, always delete the whole thing..
       But it turned out to be both satisfying  (if at times frustrating) and useful since there's no way to keep in touch with everyone as one would like to . I do think, in retrospect, that as far as keeping an accurate personal record, a private journal is probably preferable.
       Anyway, as a widening number of friends already know, I abruptly changed plans and flew home last week because one of our offspring got sick with mono. It  was a decision of the heart, not the mind, because she will be fine. But I am where I need to be. Thank you to all the friends who helped out; it meant so much  to her and me both.
        And if you have been reading this blog, thank you.  It ends, I think, right here. Cheers!      

Portuguese

You gotta love a language that spells "kiosk" like this!

Lisbon

      This is a street mural of how Lisbon  sees itself, but you could easily mistake it for a depiction of a certain, wonderful city in Northern California. 

      There's a Golden Gate Bridge in Lisbon!  Who knew!   It was built by the same company and is almost as long as the one in San Franciso. Lonely Planet says so. So it must be true. 

     

And cable cars go up and down the hills of Lisbon. 

  

     Lisbon actually wins in the hills category; they're way steeper and packed closer together here.  And, of course, there's no contest in the old stuff category. 

     This is the street where we're staying. Wall built by Visigoths, rebuilt by the Moors. 

     But both cities are full of tourists, on the water, and near wine producing regions. And red tile roofs ! And earthquakes!     

     OK.  I'm ending this. We're so NOT talking about earthquakes. 

Eurp!

      I love this place. This is Europe. The UK was nice, but here, Evora, Portugal is  really Europe.....where we, in 2013, are just a brief flicker amongst so many loves, tragedies, ambitions, frustrations, songs sung and stories told by people living here over millenia.  

     They all live on here together, separated only by the tissue of time.  Ok, I don't know anything about physics (obviously)  but " tissue  of time" sounds right to me, something thin and intermittently translucent. 

     

 Lives through the centuries bump up against one another.  Here is the medieval cathedral, probably at one time a mosque, rubbing shoulders with ...something Roman. 

       Contemporary shops and houses built into the base of a Roman aqueduct. 

       

 I love this particular juxtaposition of the centuries.  In Evora's city hall, a renovation project uncovered a Roman bath buried under the foundation.  It was excavated and you can see it in a room just off the lobby. For light, they left windows open into the offices next door, where city employees work on their computers a few meters from where Romans soak(ed) in their tubs. 

       

And finally, this.  It was in a convent which seemed to be given over at least in part to art exhibits, but I did see nuns around there. Paleolithic megaliths  (Stonehenge-style stones) abound in the area. When the Guardiana River was dammed, some of them were moved and this Stone Age (fertility symbol? ) ended up in the foyer of a ( former?) convent.  

You think what you like; I thought it very odd. 

           

        

Hunger for chocolate

     The hotel serves breakfast, crusty rolls and cheese, yogurt, muesli and a dark liquid  pretending to be coffee. It's not a meal you get out of bed eager to rush downstairs to. 

    The main meal of the day in Portugal is a late lunch. It's heavy going.  A big, hot meal in the middle of the day is not a custom we're going to adopt.  After serving dinner-at-lunchtime, restaurants close until 7:00 at night. 

     So what are you to do when breakfast wears off and you're hungry mid-afternoon?   Ah, there's a most excellent solution to that problem! The pastelerias!  Pastry shops!

   

    

Now, some people unaccountably prefer the flakey little custard filled tarts, but OMG, the Nutella filled croissants! I struggle not to moan and end up reenacting the restaurant screen in "When Harry Met Sally".   They're that good.  

  

Rah rah rah

    The University of Evora is just down the street from where we are staying. (I'd say it was a block away, but evidently the town was built before blocks were invented.) 

     

      So I may have maligned the students in a previous post by saying ( some of them) look like vampires in their school capes. To clarify, most of them look quite normal.   

      However, let me tell you what they do, They emerge and roam the streets at night in troupes (like howler monkeys?). Quite possibly their behavior is somewhat affected by imbibing vinho tinto or some other liquid intoxicant ( legally purchased in this country at 16. ) And then, when a horde of students from the faculty of economics, say, runs into a gang of engineers, the rival groups chant taunts at each other as loud as they can. They have a lot of practice,  so they're quite good at it and can keep on for quite a long time at high decibels. 

      It's difficult for the good citizens of Evora to sleep under these conditions and because there are rude words in the chorus, parents fear for the innocent ears of their children.  

     How the students can run wild in the streets yelling half the night and still have time to study is a mystery. Reportedly, these antics have something to do with new student initiation, but the academic year has been underway for two months already. 

        Fortunately, it's raining tonight and that might dampen their fervor. 

Just in time for Halloweeeeen

Here's a nice Portuguese Church in Faro:

And here's a nice Portuguese church with a STORKS' NEST on top.



















And here's a nice Portuguese church with lots of gold. There's enough glitter to make your eyeballs spasm. It's Brazilian gold, sent home to Portugal in the days of empire. If anyone in Portugal wants it back, they should contact that Argentine guy in Rome

And just in time for Halloweeeeen, here's a creepy Portuguese church (in Evora) decorated with the bones of hundreds of monks.  Don't try this decorating idea at home because the neighbors will talk. 

     Over the door to this chapel it says,  "Nos ossos que aqui estamos,  pelos vossos esperamos."  Which (and this is the great thing about Portuguese) if you know any Latin language you can probably get the gist, but it's something like "Our bones are here, waiting for yours."   

Evora is also an old university town and some of the students wear their medieval style student robes around town. Which sort of makes them look like vampires, don't you think?

And I have no idea what this is. We found it in a park by the city walls.  Just a nice piece of civic art, I guess. 

Happy Halloween! 

Toto, we're not in Scotland anymore.

      The Scots have a word, "drrechh" (phonetic approximation) to sum up a day dark, dreary, gray, wet and chill.  NOT that I personally have anything against that sort of weather, (especially if sitting by my own fire place) but it's frankly less than uplifting if you're traipsing around a strange city.  And given that it was mid-October, a certain increase in drrechh-ness is only to be expected. 

       We had a good six weeks in the UK but under the circumstances it seemed that the most reasonable thing to do was......go to Portugal. 

      

     The cheapest way to get from Glasgow to Portugal, when you want to go three days hence, is to get out your IPad and book a flight on Jet2.com.  That's what the landlady in Inverness told me as she bustled in and out of the breakfast room with plates of eggs and racks of cold toast. ( cold toast? Why?)  She flies Jet2 twice a year. Next time she's going to Majorca. 

     Jet2.com turns out to be not just a website but an airline that exists exclusively to fly planeloads of Brits to beaches on package tours. And when we landed in Faro, Portugal,  they all walked off the plane, through the airport and on to buses that drove them off to resorts where they can order fish and chips and a pint in English and lie on the beach and burn their fair, Northern flesh. 

     And that left two Americans and a South African (who was lugging a bicycle in a box, a surf board, and a surfboard carrier for the bike) ... That left us waiting to catch the public bus into the little town of Faro. 

     Faro ( and neighboring Olhao where these pictures were actually taken) turned out to be nice little towns where people get on with life.  There is minimum tourist impact, a small port and an old town with some Moorish features. And a nice Welcome to Portugal. 

Independent Scotland.

      Our landlady wears a button pinned on her apron.  All it says is "Yes."
      On September 18, 2014  Scotland will hold a referendum on independence from the UK. The issues in question are the economic strength of Scotland, defense and what the nature of ongoing relations with the UK, the European Union and other international organizations would be.  The UK government has agreed to respect the results.
       The posters below were photographed from a bus shelter on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.  (They were posted next to a community schedule for sheep grazing pasture use.)

By Garvie Bay

   Don't tell my kids about this. I wouldn't want them hitchhiking. And don't tell my mother either.  She wouldn't like it. 

     The map is a snippet from an OS map. You can buy them covering every square inch of the UK and the level of detail is amazing.  Here you can see the Garvie River, Loch Garvie and lovely Garvie Bay, located in an unpopulated area about 20 miles north of the melodically named  Ullapool where we are currently staying. Without a car. 

     Now the first thing you have to understand is that on Sunday, it's completely dead here. Nothing moves. And Saturday is about half dead. So today, being Saturday, there's a bus to Achiltibuie (pronounce that!) but there's no bus back. Still, being this close, it seemed we ought to go see the old place. 

    " Ah, now don' worry; someone'll pick you up," said Mrs MacKenzie, the landlady. And the tourist info lady said the same thing.  But just in case, she gave us the taxi number to call. But she laughed,  knowing it wasn't likely  there'd be any phone service out there on the road from Garvie Bay.     

     

      The bus dropped us off at the cattle grid and drove away down the single track road. ("Single track" means that although its a two way road, there's only room for one car.)  Did you notice whats amazing about the sky above the departing bus in this photo?   It's blue!  We've been in the UK six weeks and I can count on my fingers (of one hand) the number of fine days we've had. Today was beautiful.  

       So we followed the rushing Garvie River, admired Loch Garvie, and walked the beach of giant round stones along Garvie Bay, observed only by a curious seal.  We found the ruins of a fisherman's cottage on a nearby cove. The OS map shows the ruins of two cottages above Garvie Bay proper,  but we couldn't find them. If they were abandoned during the Clearance of the Highlands, then the heather and lichens 
have had plenty of time to cover them over. 

     

And after a long circuitous trek, we made it back to the road. Just 20 miles left to walk home and a car passed by about once every 20 minutes. But I won't leave you in suspense; Mrs MacKenzie was right! The second car to go by, an older couple from Inverness out for a drive, picked us up and drove us to Ullapool, chatting amicably. 

      And so, a Garvie went (back) to Garvie Bay today. 

     

Hungry?

Look at the bedtime snack the B&B lady left in our room.  It's not apple juice.  I always assumed whiskey would taste vile. (This assumption may have been based on  the movies. You know, the gunslingers toss it back in the saloon and wipe their grizzled lips with the back of a dirty hand.) The cowboys  never chase their whiskey with shortbread cookies,  you notice. That warm golden glow went down smooth and warm.  

   

 Oddly, this particular breakfast menu doesn't mention haggis.  Porridge was on the other side.  Some places offer that with a wee drizzle of scotch on top. 

      In cold climates, one can live happily on hot soup. A bowl of potato and leek soup or lentil are the way to go.  If you're offered Cullen Skink, take it and say thank you, cuz it's really chowder made with smoked haddock and quite good. I asked if anyone ever called it "chowder" and was gently told that would be a wee bit pretentious.

Heat your house with peat.

                       Avoid the high cost of gas and electricity!   

                           

Afterwards #3 The Ends of the Earth

         The Outer Hebrides.  There's something compelling about the far places, the end of the line,  when you step off the boat and find yourself on a beach at the edge of the earth, or as far as you can go on that road, anyway.  The Outer Hebrides.

    And there's a currently a deal on Scotrail allowing old people to travel round trip anywhere in Scotland for £19.  "Old" means over 55, which is an outrageous misuse of the term(!) but a great deal.  My travel companion, upon finding out about this deal, instantly began plotting the longest, most circuitous route to the farthest place in Scotland. 

      Thus, the Outer Hebrides. 

      Questions like "But what is there to do in the Hebrides in October?" just show that You Don't Get It. 

        The Hebrides are beautiful in a spare, uncluttered way.. It's elemental: sweeping landscapes of rock and water, some sheep, some boats, and some simple houses. It's a hard life on a rock with little arable land, but somehow they've been getting by; the islands have been inhabited since the beginning of time.  On the other hand, everywhere on the islands you see the roofless stone houses of families that left, gone to the cities, or Canada, Australia, the US. 

The main road on Harris ( as in " tweed") is one lane. Here and there the road is wide enough to pull off so oncoming traffic can pass. This time of year there is no "traffic".   Renting a car and driving on the left would most likely be calamitous,so we're  dependent on the buses that circle the island. Bus riding  actually has advantages as far as people-watching and  eavesdropping go. Sometimes  the bus is full of children going to school and sometimes it's just us and the driver. Then i can pester him with questions.  I point out a house especially well situated on the loch, and he tells the whole story of the family living there. 

      

   A fact little known: there are fine sand beaches in  the Hebrides that the rocky Mediterranean would be proud to have. The Diety must have chuckled, bestowing these beaches on an island where it's hard to imagine anyone will ever wear a bikini.  

      They have weather here, psychotic weather. Today cumulus nimbus were streaming overhead and sunshine alternated on a minute by minute basis with stinging rain. What was constant was the wind. Wind that  was a force to fight when walking, wind that blows in your face and snatches your breath away.   

                     

    At the impressive Calanais stone circle on the hill top,  I tried to shelter from the wind behind the standing rocks to take pictures. It is not an isolated site; outlying stones are visible from the hill, in nearby fields and farmyards. 

      The ever blowing wind gives you profound appreciation for the architecture of the traditional "black house", built into the hillside with stone walls two to three feet thick, where people and animal sheltered together. The " black" comes from the smoke of an open peat fire.  The roofless remains of black houses dot the landscape, often next to the modern cottage the family moved to. 

      

        

Highland fling

   

Look!  A loch! A lotta lochs! 

For the record, I nominate and elect the train ride from Fort William to Malaig as the world's most beautiful 90 minutes.  A scene of the train crossing the trestle at Glenfinnan was used in the first Harry Potter movie. Now everyone just calls it "The Harry Potter Train." 

And here's the viaduct on the Scottish £10 note:

Afterward #2 Ghost hunting

       Right down the road was the village that Jim's ggg grandfather came from. We have to go there I said. There's nothing there, he said. He was wrong.  

       When we arrived at the B&B, the landlady asked, "So why did you come here?"  It seemed an odd question for someone in the hospitality business to ask. 

       "We're ghost hunting," I said. She and her husband looked momentarily startled and I swear both of them involuntarily glanced upstairs.

          No, no, I mean his family came from here, I explained. His ggg grandfather probably had a pint with his mates at the pub across the street before he left for Canada and never came back.  So in a way, we're ghost hunting.  

       The landlady has a personal understanding of the Scottish diaspora; her mum lives in Capetown and her brother in Saskatoon. 

  

   So they sent us off to the burying grounds and we found three tombstones with the family name. There are probably more but most of the really old ones are weathered collections of lichens and impossible to read. 

    

    We walked, yes, walked, six miles up the road to the next towns, Birnum and Dunkeld.  (After the C2C, we've sort of come to feel that if you don't walk at least six miles a day, you really haven't done nothing. )

       The day was misty, but you could feel the weight of the invisible mountains around us. The towns around here are terribly historical, and lovely and when you're on foot, let me tell you, you tend to really look at things.  

     

    There's a wood in Birnum that Shakespeare wrote into MacBeth. He gave the line to a witch, "Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane Hill shall come against him."  The trees actually were rather spooky.  If they came marching up on your castle, if would be pretty clear that things were not going to end well.

      The leaves are changing already and the gray days get dark earlier. I like the way the locals say about fall, "the night comes down ."

     As for the ghosts that we may or may not have come into contact with today, that may or may not be upstairs, I'm going to stay under my duvet until the misty morning comes 

Afterward #1

     

       

     In Perth, Scotland (that's "Pairrrrrt") and I feel we have reached the very edge of comprehensible Englishes, although no doubt, like with a new pair of glasses, the brain will sort it in short order.  

      Staying in the first actual hotel since we left Manchester two days shy of a month ago. A very old hotel, where the floor slopes in a different direction with each step. 

     The  breakfast buffet boasts 135 items, but if you discount the haggis and black pudding, it's down to only 133, I suppose. I always hate it when they promise "fruit" with breakfast and it turns out to be....a big bowl of prunes. (shudder)  

     I came down to breakfast earrrrly, anticipating a cup of coffee and a chance to indulge in iPad news gathering while I wait for my slower half, but alas, no wifi in the dining room!  This hotel has been here since the mid-1500's, plenty of time, it seems to me, to get the wifi system up and running!  No wifi at breakfast strikes me as some sort of rigid olde Presbyterian prohibition like no bicycling on the Sabbath or something.  Maybe if I eat my haggis, they'll let me have wifi? 

       We tried the door at the Church of St. John down the street ( where John Knox's  preaching unleashed the protestant church-burning rabble)  but the church was closed. It's October, see.  The tourists are gone. 

        We walked, yes, walked, (it's become something of a habit) to the Palace of Scone ("Skoon") where Scotland's kings were crowned. Its the present home of the Earl of Mansfield and his lovely family which is evidently supposed to be wonderful but being a cranky colonial, I couldn't  care less about royals. Mr Earl does have a nifty garden maze though and some pet highland cattle (the "healin koo") which are sort of like shaggy Texas longhorns.  

Now that you mention it,

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time. 

Ta-Daaah!

       We did it! We walked across England!  

       We traipsed into Robin Hoods Bay mid-afternoon, signed the Coast to Coast log of finishers that is kept in the pub on the waterfront and checked it for the names of friends who finished earlier. The tide was waaaaay out, so I dropped my rock from the Irish Sea, that travelled all the way across England nestled in my backpack, into a deep tidal pool, kerplunk!  And we had a celebratory dinner with walking friends, including two indomitable ladies who were celebrating a 70th birthday and a warm hearted guy from The Other Washington, the one in the top left corner of the map. We closed the restaurant down, but the staff was very understanding about it. 

        












The last day was 15+ miles over more moorland, more lovely woodland, and just to make the thing symmetrical, ends as it began, with a walk along the cliffs over the sea. 

       

         Robin Hoods Bay is a cute little town but walkers don't own it. We finished on Saturday and the town is lively with tourists and day trippers and families eating take-away fish and chips on the beach. Walkers are a like secret society passing amongst the holidayers. 

       Our B&B is ten steps from the water front with narrow, winding hallways and claustrophia inducing, low ceilings.  The story is that the warren of cottages and old buildings at the waterfront were once linked by secret tunnels and hidden attic passageways to facilitate a thriving trade in smuggled goods. Over the last few centuries  the cliffs have crumbled, dropping  200 of these houses into the sea but now the town resides behind massive concrete sea walls buttressing the cliffs 

        We were very lucky in our walk. We finished with no physical complaints, but stories to tell. The stories are probably of interest only to other walkers, but we relish them. And we have fond memories of friendly, fascinating people, those who live along the trail and those others who like us, were only passing through. 

Penultimate Day

      We started yesterday up in the moors and descended into the picture-perfect Esk River valley.  

       The most vicarious excitement was provided by a new walking friend, Mathew, an expat Brit, who went to the pub for dinner with us last night.  Didn't I mention something about adders, the only venomous snake in the UK, last time I wrote?  It seems Mathew took a short cut through the heather yesterday morning and an adder bit his boot! He said he'd never seen an adder in 30 years and didn't really see this one either.... until it bit his boot.  Good thing he had on leather boots and wasn't shod like another trail legend, the Aussie-who-hikes-in-crocs.  (I know. It strains credulity, but people swear they've seen him. 

Share the trail

In addition to adders, one must beware of hens and ducks!        

      A B&B guy a few nights ago told me about another trail legend, an American woman hiking and carrying all her own gear. She reached the end of the trail at the North Sea ...and turned around and hiked all the way back to the start! He said he knew it really happened, because she stayed at his place going both ways.

Dream house 

Beggars Bridge at Glaisdale

      Today was a relaxed day with a relatively short walk, due to the incompetence of the lady who booked our accommodations (me), the realitive paucity of the same in the vicinity and the fact that the process did not begin until the last week in July.  (Some people make arrangements six months to a year ahead. Imagine being that organized!)  

      The town we find ourselves in tonight is Grosmont, which is pronounced "Grow-mont" in a token gesture to its supposed (by me) Norman antecedents. Aside from the fact that we didn't walk very far, it's a great place to stay; the B&B is in an art gallery! 

      There's an old railroad station here and by chance today was a big day: a celebration of old steam trains. The center of town was swarming with avid choochoo train fans,  mostly men with cameras and their indulgent wives.  They must have all had train sets when they were boys.  The locomotives really were quite impressive though, blasting enormous clouds of steam and smoke and  blowing their whistles as they chugged in and out of the station.

      Tomorrow we climb back up to the moors and head for the sea, our final day on the Coast to Coast.  It all seems pretty easy in retrospect, (although this may be a magical memory trick.) I'll be sad to reach the sea and the end of our little adventure.  But there's not much chance we'll turn around and do it all over again in reverse.