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Scotland Part 1 - Glasgow and the Isle of Skye

Glasgow

We arrived in Glasgow on Saturday morning after connecting through Heathrow. The connection was a touch tight but fine or way too close for comfort, depending on whether you're me (former) or Hannah (latter). 

Glasgow is chockablock with fish symbols, and not of the Jesus fish variety. A restaurant served us water from a pitcher shaped as a fish, for example. As it turns out, this refers to one of the four miracles of the patron saint of Glasgow, Saint (I'm not kidding) Mungo. The legend goes like this: King Riderch (I found various spellings for this name, one particularly ambitious spelling included three consecutive ds) of Cadzow, gave his wife, Queen Languoreth a ring as a gift. She in turn, gave the ring to one of Riderich's knights as a gift. Riderch found out about this re-gift and became suspicious that his wife might his wife was being unfaithful, and also - perhaps - a little peeved she re-gifted his ring, because who does that? Anyway, the king gave Languoreth a day to produce the ring and said that if she couldn't, he would execute her. Languoreth went to Mungo with her conundrum. Mungo told one of his lackeys to bring him a salmon from the river Clyde and from inside its mouth, Mungo pulled the ring.

We spent a day in Glasgow, and we enjoyed the Kelvingrove Museum and restaurants Outlier and Gloriosa.

Isle of Skye

We drove to the Isle of Skye on Sunday. No trip with Hannah would be complete without a detour to the middle of nowhere to visit an inconveniently located restaurant. In this case the restaurant was Inver, and it was situated along what I can only describe as a bicycle path, but what is for people in the UK a road that accommodates traffic from two opposing directions. Inver was lovely. We had langoustines, lamb, and halibut.

From Inver we made our way over several hours to the Kinloch Lodge. Along the way Hannah and I took in the stunning highlands landscape, which is a mountainous, rocky and mostly barren landscape, dotted here and there with woods.

The Kinloch Lodge is the former hunting lodge of the chiefs of the MacDonald clan and current favorite stay-cation locale for Eddie Redmayne. The MacDonalds are a large norse-gaelic clan that dates back about a millennia. More recently and more humorously relevant to our times, it included one Ronald MacDonald.

Ronald MacDonald, 14th Baronet, 21st Chief of Sleat

The sun sets late here. After dinner on Sunday, we went for a walk around 10pm, before sunset, only to be beset by midges, the local bloodsucking pest, along the shore.

On Monday we went to the Old Man of Storr, which isn't a man at all, but actually more of a phallic shaped rock (so man-ly?). This hike took us up a steep mountain slope dotted with sheep. At one point we were led quite astray by our hiking app, which took us through a nearby sheep pasture, complete with lots of sheep poop. 

Finally, on Tuesday, we made our way from Skye to Dunkeld, which we had been calling "Dunk-Feld" nearly up to the point of our arrival. Fortunately, we corrected this error before arriving (whew!). On the way, we took a detour to visit the Fairy Pools, which were notably lacking in Fairies, unfortunately, though they were pretty.   












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