Come on along
“No one’s ever got lost on this hike,” said Steve, our Dalrachney Lodge host in Carrbridge, as he picked us up on the lightly traveled A938 a couple of kilometers south of town.
Cairngorms National Park covers 10% of Scotland, and when Rebecca and I had reached the end of the path, with a river on the left, instead of on the right, and no bridge, I said, unhelpfully, “We’re screwed.” She, in character, turned around to retrace our steps. My only goal now was to keep her in sight.
It took us another hour to find a bridge and then, finally, the clearing where Steve had dropped us off six hours earlier.
My dying phone showed 31,722 steps and 14 miles, which broke our ten-mile record set in Malta eight years ago, when we were sexuagenarians. Debriefing with our rain-soaked maps two hours later over fish and chips for salt to help us retain water — recommended by a Canadian doctor also training around Scotland — we concluded that after we passed through the chicken coop property, allowed in Scotland, we took the least trampled path, and that made all the difference.
This was the 12th of a 15-day Grand Tour of Scotland by Train planned by McKinlay Kidd. We began in Glasgow and finished in Edinburgh, with two- and three-night stays in Oban, Spean Bridge, Portree (Isle of Skye), Inverness, Thurso, Carrbridge and Pitlochry.
In one sentence, the itinerary offered us the traditional Scotland of small villages and the Highlands, and the modern urban, with trains that ran on time.
I’ve picked a few highlights and promise to be short-winded; it’s the Scottish way.
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Our first overnight, in Oban, set the Highlands’ tone. I now understood how this part of the world captured the hearts and imaginations of Robert Burns and Bob Dylan.
Throughout Scotland, we stayed in large mansions turned into B&Bs. This is Viewfield House in Portree on the Isle of Skye. Our room was in the renovated stables in the back, up a flight of stairs, with slanted ceilings; very cozy.
During a tour of Skye, David, the physician I mentioned above, asked our guide for the name of this waterfall.
Stewart (Stu ART), who rebuilds guitars when he isn’t steering a van on the twisty, shoulder-free, one-lane roads of this large island and captivating a multinational group of twenty, and who seemed to know everyone and everything about the Inner Hebrides, said, “I have no idea, as we have so many waterfalls no one has felt the need to name them.”
Even I can’t mess up this picture.
It rained every day, usually a smirr (light), never a slotin (hard). We came prepared.
Scotland is a literary country. We found bookstores everywhere, including Leakey’s in Inverness, with no chairs and a delightfully laconic owner who responded to my churlish “Do you use the wood-burning stove in winter?” with “Do you heat your house in January?”
Even in a train station.
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Years ago, in Morocco, with a group of college students, our guide, Mohammed Oujrid, turned to us after he got in the van on the first day and said, “Repeat after me: we’re travelers, not tourists.”
By that he meant we weren’t going to move around his country in a bubble. We were going to connect with Moroccans.
That’s what we did on the trains. As you can see with Rebecca and her seatmate below.
Those are the precious connections we found at the end of the Scottish rainbows.
