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Northwest, to the coast of Scotland

Our first stop today was a diversion along the way, the Rogie Falls, a walk in the woods, a place to stand on a suspension bridge just in front of them, and a place where, in the late summer, you can watch the salmon jump upstream. I shot a video:

Here’s a place where we walked out on the rocks just above the falls:

I believed she’s taking this rock as her own personal territory.

And here we are on the suspension bridge, which sways only a tiny bit:

Our drive today took us from Inverness to Applecross and then to nearby Shieldaig. This is in the northwestern quadrant of the countryside. Here are some of the views we enjoyed on today’s road trip.

A beach scene we saw along the way:

And the classic Highland cow:

On the way to Applecross, we went over the high pass of Bealach na Bà. Below is a Hyperlapse video of a single track road, built like you’re in the Alps, lots of switchbacks. It goes from sea level to 2,054 feet. The views are spectacular — or they are cloudy and treacherous. This is the uphill side, about 45 minutes of riding, squeezing past others and waiting. It was mildly scary. It was terrific.

Bealach na Ba is Gaelic for Pass of the Cattle. Traditionally, this has been a drover’s road. Today, there are cars and motorcycles and I would like to try to ride a bike up it. Apparently there are two local races that use the mountain as part of their course.

I don’t know how to tell you about where we had dinner tonight. It was probably 40 miles from our bed and breakfast in Shieldaig, which is, itself, a lovely, small little village. The restaurant sits in a remote village called Diabaig. The trip there is rocky, rugged, and predicated by the many coastal inlets. It is an inspiring landscape.

Previously, what is now the restaurant was a small school building, a school put there simply to satisfy Scottish mileage laws. Now, Gille Brighde sits down on the water and a Dutchman and his Scottish wife make food brought to them by local farmers and fishermen. The mailman had to tell us which way to go to get there. We were probably there for two hours and four other people were there. I had a lemon hake. The Yankee had locally hand-dived scallops, which she pronounced as the best scallops she has ever enjoyed. It was a lovely meal.

Just outside the school turned restaurant is the local pier, which gets rave reviews :

That’s down in Lower Diabaig. These selfies are in Upper Diabaig. You can see the pier just on the left margin.

photo / Tuesday / windshield time — Comments Off
27
Dec 16

Travel day

On the road once more, but first, this is a charcoal drawing that some artist sketched up of me once upon a long while ago.

I wish I could find this L.F. Johnson online, and find out how life treated them. I wonder if it was someone my mom knew or if it was a street or a studio thing. One day I’ll ask.

The president’s syntax is catching on bigly in Nashville, Tennessee:

Allie is unimpressed:

And that concludes just one half of the holiday travel experience!

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13
Sep 16

Just as a frame of reference

That feeling when you are paying $1.27 a gallon.

We do miss Publix — a great deal — but that Kroger gas card isn’t a bad consolation prize.

At 7 p.m. I drove to the house in the barely thinking about a sunset hour.

That’s not too bad, either.

adventures / Bloomington / Indiana / IU / photo / Tuesday / windshield time — Comments Off
31
May 16

Fists and blades

Here we are:

We are here. So if you’ve been reading, you knew we were moving. Today we’ve arrived. We’re in Bloomington, Indiana. The Yankee and I will both be starting at Indiana University’s Media School in time for the fall. We’ll be together. No more week-long commutes. No more 142 mile one-way trips to work. No more lots of silly things.

But we’ll get to all of that another time.

Right now, almost everything we own is on a giant truck and due here tomorrow. We drove up the two cars, which were loaded with the cat, three of the four bikes and not a spare inch of extra space.

Seriously. We’d set aside an area in the old house of stuff that was going with us — things we’d need, things the moving company said we should take ourselves and enough stuff to survive a day or so without our belongings — and somehow we managed to get every bit of it into the cars. If you’d asked me to fit eight more molecules into either car I would have had to quit after the third one. But we’re here.

Scenic drive up, too:

We hit the local Kroger. That place is huge.

Tonight we’re staying in an Airbnb. There is honeysuckle out front:

Tomorrow our things arrive and we sign the paperwork on our new house. Apparently we’ll now do both of those things simultaneously. How that’s supposed to work, we don’t yet know. But, hey, that’s just another thing. We’re so used to housing weirdness at this point (You should hear about our selling experience, criminy.) that it hardly even registers. By noon tomorrow we’ll just be down to unpacking.

adventures / Friday / photo / windshield time — Comments Off
25
Mar 16

On the road again

Heading back home:

Told you Allie travels like a champ.

I think I get more twitchy in the car than she does.