You take the high road....

"You take the high road (as the old song goes), and I'll take the low road (or rather I'll take planes, trains, and buses), and I'll get to Scotland afore ye..."

And so we arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland on Friday morning after an all-night flight (and an hour or so of sleep) from Portland via Newark.  We found our way to our guesthouse and felt quite blessed to have our room ready, so we could sleep for an hour or so before heading out to begin to see the city.  We walked the Royal Mile, thinking about what we really wanted to do the next day and ate a scone as we drank some afternoon tea at the Robbie Burns.

The following day we visited Edinburgh Castle, situated at one end of the Royal Mile, looking as if it had been literally cut from the rocky crags on which it stands.  The oldest building in the complex is St. Margaret's Chapel built in 1123.  It's also about the tiniest church building I have ever seen.  We also toured some of the 43 closes (very narrow streets only 6 feet or so in width) that currently lie beneath the modern city of Edinburgh, new buildings having been built on the foundations of the old.  The closes were much like tenements, some with buildings rising 12 stories above them - not much in the way of bright sunshine streaming in. Mary King's Close is said to be cursed as so many of its inhabitants died when the plague wiped out 1/3 of the population of Edinburgh in 1645.

We also walked down to Holyrood Park and climbed partway up Arthur's Seat, a very steep hill that overlooks the city.  In addition, we bought our lunch at the local farmer's market and enjoyed it in between the raindrops in the Princes Street Gardens, absolutely beautiful public gardens.  There was so much more to see in Edinburgh, but today we moved on, taking the train to Tyndrum, the starting point for our inn-to-inn walk along the West Highland Way to Fort William.  We are in the Highlands, and it is beautiful.  We have seen "heather on the hill", and so I am humming all those wonderful songs from Brigadoon.  Once in the highlands, the highlands of Scotland.....


We are staying in a warm and cozy bed and breakfast in Tyndrum.  The inn keeper is also a massage therapist and consequently the local alternative medicine healer.  Staying in guesthouses and b&b's is alot of fun.  Joe and I enjoy all the interesting people we meet.  Here in Tyndrum, in addition to our healer/hostess, we have met a couple from Seattle also walking the Way.  In Edinburgh, we met a couple that had just returned from Iona, where we shall be going after we finish our inn-to-inn trekking.      He was a Baptist pastor from Canada and grew up quite near to where we have our summer cottage in Ontario.  It's a small world....

Tomorrow we begin our walking.  Armed with 2 guidebooks of the West Highland Way (one which provides practical information and the other which regales us with history and poetry about the region), enough lunch provisions to get us through the next two days (as there are no grocery stores along the way 'til then), and a hearty Scottish breakfast (I'm  having freshly caught brown trout), we will begin our 6.75 mile walk (the shortest of our four days).  We're hoping for good weather, which isn't likely, but we have our rain gear and good humor, so what more can we need?!