The alarm rang too early, but it was easy to get up knowing that the ferry was going to be going out. Though it was harder with thinking that we might be left behind. We liked the islands that much and hadn't felt like we'd done anything more than skimmed the surface of what there was to explore there. John's breakfast was the normal one, and he'd only ordered black pudding because I said that I'd wanted a little of it, so I had half a patty of his. Mine, though, wow... it was half a smoked fish cooked in butter and cream served with toast and the usual in cereal and juice. The fish was tender, flaky, hot and lovely in the cream, which had turned smoky flavored with the flavor of the fish. An older couple had breakfast a little after us. They were leaving on the same ferry we were, and they'd stayed an entire week at that one B&B. They were friendly and interesting to talk to and they had a healthier breakfast in that they just had cereal, fruit and toast. Then I got to see how they buttered their toast and realized why at every breakfast we'd been given, literally, handfuls of butter pats. The lady had taken what was about the equivalent of an entire pat of butter and spread it on a single half triangle of toast. I hope I didn't stare too hard, but it just floored me. We made our excuses soon after that and hurried off to pack everything into the car. We got into the line about 8:20, twenty minutes after we were supposed, but there was a long, slow line of cars getting onto the ferry, and the couple that we'd breakfasted with hadn't even left the B&B when we got in line. It turned out their car was loaded on right next to ours on the ferry, so we were in no trouble at all. I slept during the ferry ride back and for most of the ride south. The one stop we made was to head east of Inverness to find Fort George. Carol had recommended it as something that had to be seen to be believed. It was a fort that was built between 1745 and 1769 as a reaction to the Jacobite rising. It is immense. The fort uses the whole of the point of a spit of land jutting into the Moray Firth, it can easily house two infantry battalions (1600 men) and an artillery unit. The walls and moat are just absolutely awesome in scale, and when it was built the high ground 1.6 kilometers to the east of the fortress was well out of the effective capability of that eras howitzers and guns. Presently it is used as a barracks and training ground for the Queen's Own Highlanders, and one of the rather astonishing things was going through the piers, under the covered way, across the Ravelin ditch, under the ravelin, and coming face to face with a very young man standing by a watch house. He was dressed in khaki camo and carrying a very ugly looking automatic weapon. He nodded politely and I nodded politely back and next to his tiny little watch house was the very cute, very touristy and very quaint Fort Williams Gift Shop. Talk about your juxtapositions... after that we crossed a bridge into the main entrance. We wandered about the huge place, going up on bastions that were connected by areas of smooth, green lawn that grew on the top of the battlements. Crowds and crowds of people could have played Frisbee on the tops of those walls. There were batteries of Georgian and Victorian guns up there, and they were really pretty and nearly completely useless. Plaques and mannequins were everywhere giving some of the history of the place and the men that had served there. There were some sections that were being repaired, so we weren't able to go to all the bastions, and there was, as there had been at Edinburgh castle, a graveyard exclusively for the dogs of the station. It was a hot, sunny day when we were exploring the fort, and there were nearly no people around. When we went into the Queen's Own Highlanders museum the air was still and hot and in the background we could hear a TV with an announcer calling the action on the Cup soccer game we'd heard about. I wondered, out loud, if the game would be televised again that night. John said probably not, I mean they don't play the Super Bowl again the night after the game... We wandered off soon after that. We had to make as much mileage as we could towards Glasgow in order to get there the night before our plane left. So we just hopped on the Lock Ness scenic route and drove south and west. It was a beautiful drive along the lochs and in the mountains amid forest and lots and lots of near wild green. There were lots of forests planted in rows, which is still odd to see, but here were also very large areas that were just wild forest next to the water. There were also castles all over the place, on the water, on the mountains, and in nearly all the cool scenic spots. A little less scenic but a bit more amusing were all the Nessie statues that dotted the resorts along the long lakes. That was pretty amazing to see the first couple of time, great plastic statues of Nessie in fine American tradition along the two lane highway. We pushed all the way to Fort William, about 7pm, before stopping to look for a B&B. There was one just south west of the city and a nice young lady with two kids showed us her two rooms and recommended one over the other for room. So we unloaded our stuff and went for dinner in lovely downtown Fort Williams. Took us a while to figure out where the best places for food were, and we actually stopped at a gas station for gas. One of the reasons this is noteworthy is out in the filling area, along with charcoal for BBQs and the usual bundles of kindling and wood for fires, there were huge bags of dried peat as well big bags of coke. Something we'd never see in the U.S., but it seemed right for Scotland. There was an obvious shopping/tourist section to town, and after wandering about for about half an hour in suburbia on the rims of the city and trying to find something that wasn't too touristy we gave up and went downtown. We looked through the menus of about half a dozen different places, and finally settled on a tavern/restaurant called Ben Nevis, which wasn't nearly as bad as the place with the Highland Dancers that did entertainment at 7pm and 9pm Every Evening. Since we were along the lochs I got a whole, grilled rainbow trout. It was lovely, grilled in butter and herbs with plain boiled potatoes on the side and a mess of vegetables that were cooked just until they were done. that was really good. The trout was a wonderful exercise in precision because of the delicate and plentiful but neatly in row bones amid the delicate flesh. I had lots of fun just gently and carefully doing the separation. The waitress said that she didn't have the patience for that kind of thing. Yum. Back to the room for tea and letters and what turned out to be cookies (okay biscuits) that were a lot like giant chocolate mint Girl Scout cookies. And, sure enough, the Cup game was being replayed on TV, so we got to watch two hours of high speed, brutal British football while sipping tea and eating biscuits. Wow. I really, really loved it. ---------- Breakfast was the traditional fare, but with individually boxed cereals instead of any choice. Two Germanic climbers came through, on their way out to climb Ben Nevis. The cool thing was that the breakfast tables were out on the front porch, so we were able to watch the loch flow by as we ate. That was a lot of fun, especially since the day was a cool, sunny spring day. We'd done a portion of this drive before on the way from the Isle of Mull, as we'd wanted to see the highest mountains on the mainland of Britain. I remember the mountains. They were as beautiful and the roads as twisty as I remembered. The sunshine made for a really handsome set of pictures and the scenery was utterly breathtaking. And the driving was just as insane as last time. This time, though, John got to say that he was glad he didn't have to deal with it. Chuckle. I did. It was great fun, too, in our 'snub-nosed shrew of a car'. Since it had no wheel base it responded to any change in the direction of the steering and balance of the car, so when the wind blew it would veer a bit wildly, and when the we went around curves it would drift. Yeek. No wonder John had such a terrible time with it. I didn't have quite the same problems that he did with finding the gears, but did have some of the same problems with differentiating between the high beam and the turn indicator. One rather startling thing was just how close the city limits of Glasgow was to the forest, mountains and water. There wasn't the gradual introduction of civilization as there is when one goes from the Cascades into Seattle, where there are tiny communities way out, and then they get closer and bigger and denser as you move in until you get to the city. With Glasgow we were in mountains and trees and ten miles later we were next to mini-malls and streetlights with stacked housing. First thing we did was go to the airport, scope out exactly where we needed to be in the morning, and then went from the airport out, looking for a B&B. We had absolutely no luck, going through a good seven or eight little townships before finally stopping at a gas station. The girl in there gave us some instructions, and WAY, way out later, we found a B&B, but she was full up. She pointed us at a different B&B and after going past miles and miles and miles farmlands and green spaces, we found the place in the middle of a farm. This farmhouse was neat and clean and lovely. The woman that showed us our room was a no-nonsense British mother, with the very clipped English accent instead of the Scottish burr and she was very efficient about things. We needed a fairly early breakfast in order to make our flight and she had no problems with that. We had to pack *everything* that was in the car for the next morning, so we trooped back and forth from the car to the room clearing the car out completely and filling the small bedroom with Stuff. It took quite a while. When we finished, I put the money to pay for the room under a vase in the room. We had exactly five pounds and random change left after that. We talked with the woman about the flight and how best to get back to Glasgow for the afternoon. She pointed out where we were on the map that we had of the area, and, by taking a different turn, we were in town in a bare quarter of a mile. It was astonishing, to me, just how close farmland and townhouses were. Kinda cool in some ways. Downtown Glasgow is a big, modernized old city. It hustles and bustles and has plenty of new construction mixed in with the old. Very much unlike Edinburgh, it had lots of new places, including a huge new mall that was all shiny steel and glass. We wandered through it all, trying to find a place to do our last minute shopping for things like Hob Nobs, lemonade and the like. We found a Marks and Spencer after a *lot* of walking and stocked up only to find that we had to pay cash. Luckily, since it just biscuits and pop, plus our lunch, the five pound note and some loose change covered it all. Since it was such a modern town we found phonecard phone booths just about everywhere. So we called Jenny Kosarew, my knitting friend, called Tanais to tell him our flight information, in case he wanted to meet us in the international lounge, as he'd told me earlier that he was leaving for the US the same day we were. I also tried calling one of Mark's friends in Glasgow, but had no luck. So I handed the card to John and he called his cousins, the Hamiltons, in Darvel, and got directions on how to get there and everything. I tried Mark's friend again after John was done and still no luck. We walked back to the car and ate our sandwiches and sipped our lemonade on the way to the cousins. ----- end of part 9 of 10 ----- Copyright 1995 by Phyllis L. Rostykus. All rights reserved.