If I haven’t been blogging much these days, you can be sure it’s not for lack of subject matter. Regardless of what’s going on in my life, I always have something to say about it. The horses in my head are always pawing the ground, pacing the pen, eager to run. When the gate swings open, they’re off, tearing joyfully if heedlessly across my crazy brain terrain.

On the page this translates to semi-coherent stream-of-consciousness babbling — the raw stuff of genius flows fast and furious. But to fashion that into something worth reading is a horse of a different color. Every five minutes of writing takes half an hour of rewriting. (Trust me, I do this for a living.)  And who has that kind of time, when there are all those old episodes of Heroes to get caught up on?

I don’t know why I feel that every blog post must be a tiny work of art. I don’t think it’s necessarily because I’m a “writer.” I have a non-writer, non-blogger friend who feels exactly the same way about writing e-mails home to mom: that each one must be a thoughtful meditation on Where He Is In His Life Right Now or its not worth the bandwidth. Blurg. No wonder Twitter is so popular.

What I do know is that despite my passion for expressing myself in words, it is often difficult. Babbling is easy; writing can be hard. And when so many other things are calling me — gardening, housework, exercise, Netflix — well, it’s all too easy to just drag the doc to the trash and go lose myself in Sylar’s eyebrows.

But. I’ve got a big but.

I don’t want to bin the Rib. She reminds me of the importance of being creative, even when it’s work. That the alternative, at least for me, is to die a slow, painful, corporate death from which not even the miraculous Claire Bennett could resurrect.

So I apologize in advance if the horses thunder by once and a while. Or even maybe a lot. The last season of Lost will be available on Netflix soon.

1. Attributed to Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw and Blaise Pascal.

The Laughing Heart

your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can’t beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.

–Charles Bukowski

Via.

The train ride along the west coast of Scotland is in all the travel books as one of the most beautiful journeys around. This time we just enjoyed the view and didn’t try to take photos, except for one or two of the bridge that’s in all the Harry Potter movies.

Got to our Edinburgh hotel by early evening and had enough time to walk the Royal Mile. Locals and tourists were spilling from every bar into the street, giddy with the 80-degree weather (another Seattle moment) and were still partying when we finally called it a day at ten.

We only had one full day to see Edinburgh and no car, so we stuck to the historic downtown area. I still have the photos from my high school trip and I can attest that after twenty-four years, all the old stuff is the same if you can find it under the heavy layer of marketing.

Edinburgh is full of history and a list of what we saw would be encyclopedic so here’s an illustrated list of highlights:

• Tour bus: not as fun as the Hop On, Hop Off in Dublin, but still a great way to meet a city.
• New Parliament building designed to “blend in” with the rest of the city: FAIL.
• Storming the castle: Beautiful, but it’s so refurbished and commercialized it feels like a replica at Disneyland. But I did learn more about it this time since we wore those headphones with the taped audio guide. (Kevin and I are now fairly proficient in Travel Geek Sign Language.)
• Changing of the guard:  Real women wear kilts and carry big guns.
• Heart of Midlothian: The brick mosaic on the Mile where executions used to take place.  Tradition says you’re supposed to spit on it for good luck, which I guess is why there’s very little marketing for this particular landmark.
• IRN-BRU: Somewhere along the Mile, Kevin bought a bottle of this local refreshment which contains about two grams of speed and tastes like liquid Jolly Rancher.
• Elephant House: Cafe that supposedly tolerated an impoverished JK Rowling while she wrote the first Harry Potter. Dubious claims aside, they serve Guinness and are nice to tourists so they are ok in my book.

Fell into bed exhausted and watched some made-for-tv movie starring Julie Walters about a matron who “cleaned up” English television in the 60′s.  It had amusing undertones of repressed sexuality, but seriously, I do not need to see Molly Weasley get her tits out.

On the way to the airport the next day, posted a blog via the free wireless on the bus. Sweet.

On the plane home, I tried to recline my seat and got pushed back up by the old Scottish lady behind me.  Her old Scottish husband poked Kevin in the back, too.  We asked them if there was a problem and they said yes, you’re reclining your seats. So we settled the argument by feeding theirs to them. (Alas, no photo available.)

And on that civilized note, thus endeth the BritBlog. It’s great to have had the best of both worlds: a wonderful trip and happy to be home.

Stay tuned later today for the last installment of the BritBlog in which we take a ferry through the mists of Avalon, pronounce Edinburgh incorrectly a lot, and get in a fist fight on the plane with an elderly Scottish couple who apparently grew up in a cave.

1. Current banner is based on the super-cute 52. she’s gone where the goblins go by rachel a. k. on flickr.

Been trying to publish the last BritBlog post but am getting an error. Oh Rib, why hast thou forsaken me, you old bat?

Thank you, dear reader, for your patience whilst I contact my Blog Father in hopes that he can help me figure out what I did this time.

Meanwhile I am attempting to post from my Flickr account. This is a photo I took our first night in Edinburgh. It happened to be the warmest day of the year and the partiers were out in force, spilling out of every bar on the Royal Mile. I don’t remember which famous Scott the statue is of, but by the end of the evening, he was wearing a traffic cone as a hat.

We saw a lot more hikers this time and no wonder. At the foot of the mountain the path goes through a forest so dense it blocks most of the sun and the pines are smothered in moss. That gives way abruptly to a treeless hillside covered in grass made greeny-green from plenty of rain, sun and sheep poop, and dotted everywhere with black basalt boulders, dandruff from the formations at the top. There’s a sign at the base of the formations that warns “You are not advised to go further” which of course people ignore because the view from the ridge just beyond is unmissable. The view is of the Sound of Raasay (thanks Wikipedia!).

The pic of Kevin and me in the previous post was taken on the ridge, and behind us is the Old Man. All during the hike I kept thinking it looked like a piece of poo but nobody would say it. Glad I’m getting it out of my system now (lucky readers).

After the Storr we drove further up the coast to the viewpoint for the 350-foot cliffs of Mealt Waterfall and Kilt Rock. The waterfall is fed by a loch and believe it or not, much of its water is blown away by the wind before it hits the ocean.  Kilt Rock is named so because the patterns in the rock resemble a tartan.

At this point in the day we didn’t have much of a plan other than to drive all the way around the peninsula and be back in Portree by evening. Sometimes no plan is the best plan…

By the time we reached the remote northern tip, both of us had to go to the bathroom so we thought we’d see if the proprietors of the tiny Duntulm Castle Hotel would loan us their facilities. They turned out to be kind and gracious folks who charmed us so much we decided to have a coffee break out on their patio, which is practically on the shore. So we had an unexpected moment of bliss, drinking coffee and eating treacle muffins at the edge of the world.

But wait, there’s more. A few hundred yards from the hotel, perched on a small cliff, is a pile of rubble we learned is Duntulm Castle. A  surprise ruin! We tromped around, took a few pictures, and got chastised by one very indignant sheep. Seriously, it had to be the loudest, most annoyed sheep on the Isle of Skye.

From Duntulm we headed back down the other side of the peninsula. At one point there was some road construction going on and we had to stop — and what do you know, grazing in a field along side the road were two of the shy, prehistoric-looking Highland sheep known as “hairy coos”.  I’d given up on getting to see them.

Near Dunvegan, we spied a old cemetery sprawling across a hillside so of course we had to stop and let me commune with the dead.

A bit further down the way, near the village of Struan, we visited the last surprise ruin of the day – a dun beag (“small fort” in Gaelic) dating back to the Iron Age. That’s where I met another tourist from Idaho who, as it turned out, lived most of her life a few blocks from where Kevin and I live now. How does that song go… “It’s a small world after all.”

Photo: Self-portrait of Uppity and Kevin and the Old Man of the Storr, Isle of Skye, Scotland, by Uppity, May 2010

When last we left our heroine, she was on the train to the Isle of Skye. The train goes up through the Scottish Highlands which are really lovely.

OK, they’re not lovely. They’re indescribable, really. Let’s say they’re beautiful. Sometimes rugged and often haunting. Barren in parts and lush in others. Forested here and deserted there. Huge lakes with dark, misty islands full of magic.  See?

The photos, which will soon be on Flckr (link to follow), could never capture it but mine do even less because they’re all from a train window. But we tried!

Train dropped us off in the Kyle of Lochalsh where we picked up our rental car. This one handled a bit better than the last; at least, the driver swore less. From Lochalsh we drove to the Eilean Donan Castle, which has the distinction of being in that iconic ’80s film, Highlander. It was fun to finally see it so I could stop saying “There can be only one!” in anticipation fifty million times a day.

From Donan we drove up to Portree, the main town on the Isle of Skye. Skye is like the Highlands: beautiful with all kinds of landscapes. It feels old and remote and mysterious. And wet. Yes, wetter than Seattle. Wet like everything seems damp all the time, like in Hawaii except colder.

Despite the clamminess, Skye was one of my favorite parts of the trip. The only disappointment was our guest house, which left a lot to be desired. Granted, we had just come from Kilronen House in Stirling which was incredibly comfortable and attractive; it’s a hard act to follow and made the shabby Pink Litter Box (Kevin’s name for it; mine was a good deal more profane) seem even shabbier.  Tea bags with no wrappers or even their box? Eyew.

Anyway. The first thing we did the next day was go to the Talisker Distillery and learn how the Scots make their fabulous whiskey. At Talisker I finally found a “Scotch” I like.  We bought a bunch and hoped it wouldn’t get stolen when we flew home. (It didn’t.)

We hiked both days in Skye and saw completely different landscapes (purely by accident, of course). On the first day, we drove deep into goat-trail country, looking for a stone circle. We never did find it, but we found a trail that we thought might lead us somewhere because there were a few other cars parked beside the entrance. So we walked up the rocky trail, further and further into very quiet, empty, moorish hills. Eventually we saw a few other walkers so we didn’t get too skeeved out about the remoteness. At the top of the hill, we looked down into a valley, at the bottom of which was a little house at the edge of a lake. One of the other walkers told us that the house is only accessible by boat (or walking the goat trail). The man who owns it rents it as a holiday house. The little shack next to it has no lock on the door; it’s a shelter for hikers to wait out bad weather.

On the way back, the fog rolled in over the hills. It’s a bit unnerving to be engulfed by a giant cloud, but it’s not so bad when no monsters charge out to eat you and you remember that the only creature you’ve seen all day is the cow at the start of the trail.

That night we ate in a hippie restaurant a few blocks from the Litter Box that could have been taken straight from Fremont: informal atmosphere, colorful waitresses, great menu, and out of most of the food you want. Made me homesick.

Stay tuned for our next post, Skye 2, in which we go on a much prettier hike, see hairy coos, visit another graveyard, have the best muffins in the world in a beautiful spot, and yes, visit MORE RUINS!

Photo: Cows at Castlerigg, County Cumbria, England, by Uppity, May 2010

Then we said good bye to the Lakes and headed north for bonnie Scotland.

On the way we checked out Housestead, the best Roman fort in the UK. Now I can say I’ve stood in an actual Roman latrine. The ruins sprawl across a vast expanse of green hillside; my photos could never show how big it is. We spent so much time there we both got sunburned (not something one normally worries about when visiting the UK…).

Drove into Stirling that evening. Stirling is pretty close to Edinburgh and used to be the capital of Scotland. It has a well-known, well-preserved and well-renovated castle. Stirling also has what one of the guests at our b & b called the “Mel Gibson Monument,” a Victorian-era tower erected in honor of William Wallace of Braveheart legend. We walked to it after dinner; it’s basically a five-story phallic symbol.

The next morning was reserved for preparation for our train ride to the Isle of Skye so we had a transportation adventure: drove to Edinburgh, dropped off our bigger suitcase at our hotel for safekeeping, returned our rental car to Hertz, and then caught a train back to Stirling, then walked the three miles from the station to our b & b. It doesn’t sound like a big deal and indeed it isn’t if you know your way around — but we’re in Scotland. But we made it without any melt-downs even though both of us are Nervous Nellys when it comes to what Kevin calls “logistics.”

Did some sight-seeing in Stirling, including the castle which was pretty cool. (You can tell I’m beginning to get castled-out when my descriptions of them are reduced to that.) On the walk back to the b & b, we went through a park with cherry trees in bloom. Kevin tried to shake the blossoms down on us romantically but all we got was wet. He got an A for effort, though. Had fish ‘n chips and delicious ice cream in a mom ‘n pop place devoid of tourists.

Next day we hopped a train through the Highlands, destination the Isle of Skye. Have to save that for next post since I’m blogging from the free wireless on the bus and the Edinburgh Airport is coming up soon. Technology these days!