More Catch Up......
In August the family Mc spent an incredible ten days in Scotland -- Edinburgh, The Isle of Skye, Inverness, and back to Edinburgh. Scotland has been on my must see list, ever since I discovered the Gabaldon
Outlander series, back in our Tallahassee days. Having been there and done that, I think I must go back--and often. Mc... is Scottish in origin. As it's a name I inherited, I didn't go all gaga for clan roots and stuff, but still, the entire country is steeped in a profound sense of history.
We flew into Edinburgh, spent three nights in a rented flat in the northern suburb of
Leith, a quiet residential neighborhood in a well-loved, but safe apartment that the landlord was kind enough to stock with rolls and milk and OJ, knowing we had wee ones and our flight didn't land until 10:30 PM and we'd be at least midnight getting from the airport.
We rented a car and D did a good job driving on the "wrong" side of the road:never once went the wrong way around a roundabout! He had a tendency to hug the left curb a little closely, a natural sense we suspect. As an American driver, you're used to being on the left side of the road, so you tend to put yourself there. Later in the week, when we meandered some of those steep highland passes, I found myself often repeating "close on the left, close on the left", but all in all, the driving was a non-issue (not that
I wanted to drive, at all, mind you).
Edinburgh was busy and very crowded the days we were there. It was the Edinburgh Festival and the famous Military Tattoo. Kidless, we would have found last minute tickets to the Tattoo, but with the youngins in tow contented ourselves with photographing the parade grounds as we walked through Edinburgh castle.
Our first day in Edinburgh we walked the length of the Royal Mile, parking at
Holyrood Palace meandering our way to the
Castle and then back down. C was worn out from the trip, so spent most of the afternoon asleep in the stroller and missed the castle entirely. But never fear,there were many more castles to come. Fortunately, I had purchased a new, more comfortable, travel-friendly baby carrier for this trip, suspecting just such an occurrence. (Baby in fact spent nearly the entire trip tucked in my coat in his new carrier. Either we were places that were not stroller friendly or we were walking long distances and big brother needed to ride.)
Our second full day in Edinburgh we started the morning at the Royal Yacht Britannia, decommissioned in 1996 and now a Edinburgh-area tourist attraction. It was a fun outing. C got his own audio tour guide and kept himself busy looking for the next number in the guide, shouting gleefully when he found it. Supposedly his guide was geared for kids, not sure he listened to much of it though.
The picture to the right is a picture of the officer's bar, but note the audio guide sitting on the bar. Yep, that's right, C set his down and walked off to find more numbers, leaving it on the bar. So we toured this section of the boat twice, backward and forward, once I realized we were down one audio guide.
After the boat tour and a quick lunch, we stopped by a local botanical garden, just in time to catch a free festival event--circus acrobats giving a short teaser performance, hoping to entice you into buying tickets for their main event later that evening. We went because we thought C would enjoy the performance and so that we could say we attended a festival event. From what we can tell the festival is simply weeks of performances. The Royal Mile is jam packed with ticket sellers, trying to convince you to attend their shows. With another day in Edinburgh we likely would have found a kid show to take the boys to, but as it was we made do with our abbreviated garden circus. After a quick nap at the apartment, we spent the evening strolling the "new" section of Edinburgh, beneath the Royal Mile. Had to eat at McDonalds that evening because none of the local pubs would allow us inside with children under 18. (Well, that and sometimes fast food is just easier. As I've said before my kiddos are awesome travelers, but at the end of a jam-packed day, there are just some battles not worth fighting)
In the end I enjoyed the Highlands far more than I did Edinburgh, but if I ever go back to Edinburgh, I definitely won't go during festival season. SOooooo crowded. Hard at times to navigate the stroller. We had to wait 45 minutes for a table at a burger joint at lunch. But I'm glad to say I was there and I can now place all the famous Edinburgh landmarks I encounter in books.
The next morning we loaded up our car and headed out on the Highlands portion of our adventure. Our final destination that evening was the Isle of Skye--one of the most remote, but also most beautiful areas of the Highlands. The Isle of Skye is the only place in Scotland that a significant percentage of the population still speaks Gaelic. On Skye, in fact, Scottish kids can go to school in Gaelic all the way through university. We had reservations on a 16:00 ferry and knew we wanted to stop at Stirling Castle along the way. Stirling Castle was an important site in both of the Jacobite risings, but was also important in William Wallace's (
Braveheart) story centuries before. We got an early enough start to get to the Castle by about 10 -- good thing too as the crowds when we left were astounding. (Same thing at Britannia, btw. We got there when they opened,but by the time we left --sardine city!)
C and Scottish castles are a good fit. German castles (at least in this region) are small and compact with a designated route to explore, often in cramped quarters. Scottish castles (at least the three we saw)are large and expansive with lots of room for little feet to climb and romp. D and I half-listened to audio guides while we followed C around the ramparts and into tunnels. He thought the prison cells were quite the thing and enjoyed testing out his balancing skills along the castle's walls. We could have easily spent another hour or so at Stirling but had to hit the road in order to make our 4:00 ferry. The road we drove en route to the ferry, lowlands to highlands, was a scenic route full of postcard views (the pictures don't do it justice), but it's also the route that parallel's the Hogwart's Express on it's journey from Kings Cross Station 9 and 3/4 to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry!
We made it to the ferry on time, had what I thought was a rather rough crossing, but a cuppa tea later, emerged onto the beautiful and breathtaking Isle of Skye. Skye has the most beautiful scenery I've ever seen, and I've spent a good deal of time in both the Rocky and Smokey mountains, not to mention a wee bit of time driving through the Alps. The Scottish Highlands is indeed God's Country. If you're going to the Highlands for the views, go to Skye (The Inverness area was nice, but the panoramas didn't compare at all to the Skye landscape). If you go: be warned that there's not a lot to do in Skye other than to drive and look, hike and marvel. There are one or two inn's on the island, a multitude of B&B's and a few hostels and while many of them are I'm sure, very nice, there's obviously no such thing on Skye as luxury accommodations. We stayed at a rustic "bothy", much like a camping cabin with a kitchen, bath and bunkhouse. We rented the 6 bed bunk-house for just us, so it was private and while I, personally, tried not to look too hard in the corners and crevices for fear of mold and cockroaches, C and his daddy thoroughly enjoyed the rustic adventure. (And B, bless his heart, has pack n play, will travel).
We spent two nights on Skye. The first night, arrived just before dinner and ate in one of the two local pubs (Here you could bring in kids, but only until 9PM). NO high chair, NO milk, NO juice, but the boys survived on boiled potatoes and fanta, while D and I had the most spectacular local catch--some kind of white fish and YUMMY! Skye is rather sparsely populated, but it boasts a town of decent size, Portree, and that's where we started the next morning, with a cooked breakfast in a local cafe (Haven't had scrambled eggs out since we left the States, so this cooked breakfast was in itself, quite a treat.) Then, we left Portree to embark on Rick Steves' recommended driving tour of the Island. We spent about 6 hours looping the Isle, stopping to ogle at waterfalls and walk out onto rock outcroppings. we wasted an hour at a little snack shack, that had the most varied menu I'd ever seen at a snack shack, everything from panini sandwiches to pasta primavera and fish and chips, but what they don't tell you on the menu is that it takes 45 minutes to get a grilled ham and cheese, but it was, no kidding, the ONLY place to grab grub for miles, so we lingered and let C run off some energy on the hills.
After lunch, we made a quick pit stop at the only public restrooms north of Portree (our starting point). Really Steves puts them in his guide book so you don't miss them. Holes in the wall, literally, but clean and with soap, so who's complaining. We encountered Castle Donvegan, cliffside ruins of Clan McLeod, not an official historic site, but only partially fenced off without a "no Trespassing" sign anywhere nearby. The boys had fallen asleep in the back of the car at this point, however, so D went exploring while I supervised naptime along the side of the road (D later reports that the climb was too steep for little legs, so it's just as well). Then, we headed back to our bothy, stopping to admire the cliffs to the sea as well as an example of the close-to-extinct croft system that used to drive the Scottish economy. Crofting is the Scottish version of tenant farming or sharecropping. Legend has it, btw, that the Isle of Skye is where Bonnie Prince Charlie came ashore during the 1745 Jacobite rising and where he escaped from after the clans' defeat at Culloden.
Our bothy was not in the main town on Skye, we were in Portnalong, not more than a village, really, but a village that also houses the only distillery on the island. Our last morning on Skye, D toured the
Talisker distillery while the boys and I played for an hour or so at the local playground. Kids under eight weren't allowed inside. Then it was off, over the relatively new and picturesque Skye bridge, past the
Eilean Donan castle (as seen in
Highlander, the Movie) to Urquhart Castle on the shore of the Loch Ness and into Inverness for the rest of our stay.
We skipped the "official" Loch Ness tourist traps, but C had a marvelous time looking for Nessie as we climbed the castle walls. The picture to the right is C in the Loch Ness.
Inverness: 4 Nights at a lovely townhouse just outside the city itself. Rick Steves warned there's not a lot to do in Inverness itself, and he's right but there is a lot to do nearby.
Day One we rewarded C for being such a trooper with a day at an
amusement park. It was actually more like Bouncy House City, ala Monkey Joes, but he went nonstop for 5 hours. D liked it too because they had a grown up ropes course, rappelling, and a flume ride he and C went on together. The front half of the park is the play area and the back half is nature trails. So, B and I wandered the nature trails and then had a long lunch in the cafe that had free wifi while I checked email and goofed around online.
Day Two we made it to Culloden -- a very very kid friendly museum, btw. There's a self-paced indoor part, that takes about 30 minute to go through, showing a timeline of events, both from the British and Jacobite perspectives. A movie that's too violent for the munchkins, so skip it with the under 10 crowd, but dress up trunks with soldiers uniforms and hands on rifles and bullets. Then you pick up a GPS and head out to the moor. The GPS, talks to you automatically based on where you are on the moor. The moor is huge and flat and C, in his yellow raincoat, could go anywhere and we could still spot him. (Likewise he could still spot me in my green raincoat). He took a siesta on a rock for 20 minutes when he got tired, and simply wandered the paths the rest of the time.
Day Three: we shopped in down town Inverness, bought a cashmere scarf for myself, cute litte hats for the boys, a signed copy of Book 3 of the Outlander series in a Scottish Borders. (We meandered forever in that same Borders, the first English language bookstore we'd encountered in forever, spent an hour in the kids section, thumbed all the travel guides, read the backs of the best sellers, drank the coffee). Next it was off to the honest-to-goodness mall. Then, strolling the river walk by the River Ness and sampling the local Chinese food for dinner. After dinner, headed to Clava Cairns, a prehistoric cluster of rock formations, just a block or two from our apartment.
There was one other family at the site(a Spanish family) and C had good fun talking to them, using his minimal Dora/Diego, mommy-prompted Spanish. C and their daughter chased each other around the rocks for a while, playing hide and seek among the ruins and C, of course, had to gather a stone on the ground (not one form the ruins) to bring home with us to add to his collection.
The next morning we loaded up to begin the drive back to Edinburgh to catch our evening flight home. We had enough time en route to stop one place, and decided on Pitlochry, a completely *charming* village full of boutique shops and Scottish souvenirs. I wanted to bring home a kid-sized set of bagpipes on clearance in one store, but D wouldn't hear of it (or rather I think he was afraid he'd hear nothing but them, once we got back). D kept up with the boys while I shopped, then we strolled over to the river and followed the river to the dam and its accompanying fish ladder, bribing C the whole time with the promise of ice cream and playground time. "If you're too tired to walk to the fish ladder, then you're too tired to have ice cream or play on the playground" He quickly found his second wind.
As we made it to the playground, I used my last diaper for B. So I dashed off to the closest grocery store while the boys played. Of course at this small-town grocery the smallest package of diapers I could by was a 64 pack and I really only needed 2, maybe 3, to get us home, which left us in the parking lot stuffing an entire package of diapers into our already over packed luggage.
In the end, we took the high road
and the low road. We found the banks of Loch Lomond and they, as well as the rest of Scotland, are very bonny indeed!
Well, that's exactly what we did. The Disney magic left Port Canaveral May14 bound for Barcelona, Spain. She arrived two weeks later and in between stopped in the Bahamas; Funchal, Portugal; Gibraltar; and Cadiz, Spain. Of the 14 nights on board, 6 of those were at sea crossing the Atlantic between Castaway Cay, Bahamas and Portugal's Atlantic island, Madeira. Almost everything we've done over here falls somehow/someway into a "best ever" category, but it was indeed "the best ever" (or at least very very cool) to wake up on day 3 and look at the map on your stateroom TV and see the boat smack dab in the middle of the ocean, to stand at the rails and see nothing but ocean all around you and know that yep, there really is nothing but ocean all around you. Six days trapped on a cruise boat with no where to go but on another lap around the deck might be a little much on any other cruise line, but I think I could spend 6 weeks on a DCL cruise and not once feel the need to send anyone up the crow's nest looking for land. All the glowing things I wrote about our first DCL experience holds true, especially the dining room staff who made it their mission to get my picky two year old to eat something other than chocolate milk. 
(Full Disclosure: Some of my continued DCL enthusiasm comes from the fact that in the months since our eastbound transatlantic with Disney we have taken an eastern Mediterranean cruise with another major cruise line, and while that was a great trip with some of the most AMAZING sightseeing, the cruise experience on that other boat can't compare to DCL's. If we had never sailed with Disney, we would have loved sailing this other line, but as we had already sailed Disney we were left thinking this other company needed to find itself a stash of pixie dust somewhere)
I also very much enjoyed MADEIRA, Portugal. We made port at Funchal and took a sightseeing bus up into the mountains. We saw some stunning scenery and ate a wonderful lunch of Espada, the local catch, at a cliffside patio cafe. Then, we rode the bus back downtown to shop for lace and wine. Here's another thing I like about DCL: We landed in Funchal on a Sunday, yet DCL made prior arrangements with some local shops to be open. (In contrast, that other cruise line put us ashore in Malta on a Sunday where not-a-thing but a few tacky souvenir stands and bars were open.) Because it was Sunday, we couldn't go to a tasting at the most famous of the Madeiran wine bars, but the wine shops we stopped into did tastings for us and of course we came home with several bottles of the famous spirit. The Bordal lace "factory" also opened and we saw where generations of Madeiran women have made lace products by hand; they still make their lace by hand at this factory. And although lace isn't really my style, I now have a far better appreciation of just how much work goes into producing one lace tablecloth.
