<$BlogRSDUrl$>

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Well, I guess it is time to say at least something about what happened on my way up to the Western Isles last week. I decided to leave Tuesday and return on Friday. I had a couple of things that I had to do over the weekend. Anyway, the trip up was uneventful. The scenery was beautiful as usual. I spent most of my time staring out the window. I arrived in Oban and walked over to the ferry terminal and purchased a ticket. The ferry is pretty funny on how it pulls up to the dock. The dock is not like the ones at home. They have to come in hard and fast then cut the engines and do what amounts to a power slide to be parallel to the coast line. I wondered how they got it right every time and how many times the came in too fast and slammed up against the concrete dock.

I arrived in Craignure about forty-five minutes later. I caught the bus from there to Tobermory. The driver told us about the Tobermory Music Festival, which was going to be that weekend. He called the Tobermory Whiskey Olympics. That does not surprise me for a town of 900, which has two fully stocked bars (the Mishnish, which is on the west side of the main street, is quite large for a two that size). Anyway, all I really did while I was there, was walk around the forested parks they had. There is a trail that goes along the coast line and looks out over the islands of Coll and Tiree. Well, the weather decided to be nasty that day so it was blowing very hard and the rain was coming down as well. In the less rocky parts of the trail were large mud holes, so I decided that I would just jump over them. Well, the cliff on my right hand side did not have a hand rail (only the side which was on the hill did, which is interesting I do not think that it is less safe to fall into a hill than fall off a cliff). So when I jumped the wind picked up hard and nearly blew me off the cliff. I had this vision of my body washing up on Coll and everyone wondering where the hell it came from. Anyway, I finally made it out to the lighthouse. It was pretty even with the weather being as it was. I could see the stark yet green mountains on the isles.

Other than that, I sat around the youth hostel and drank tea and read a novel. It was pretty boring but very relaxing. The trip home was interesting. Two old drunken Glaswedgen guys decided to sit across from me. One was flirting with the stewardess. The other was drinking the Scotch his friend kept buying for him. They were pretty much gone by the time we made it to Glasgow. I found out that the one directly sitting across from me just came back from his mother's funeral so I cut them some slack. In any case, I could barely understand anything they were saying so most of it was lost on me.

On Saturday, I went over to fix the computer of the Scottish Studies librarian. It is always fun to go over there. I was working on an iMac, a computer which I have not worked on in a very long time. It took me a while to figure it out but I got all of their stuff working and the DVD player in it was fine. On Sunday, we had a party for a student who is moving into her own flat. It was fun. Anyway, I should get to work on this outline for my supervisors.


posted by Chris  #5:09 PM | 0 comments |