The Neutral Zone

Our next stop in Scotland was the large national park called the Cairngorms that stretches across a broad swath of the eastern and southern highlands. The Cairngorms have stunning hills, mountains, forests, and lochs. The park is dotted with adorable Scottish towns like Dunkeld and Braemar and crisscrossed with windy roads that meander through the glens, over the hills, and between the mountains.  Roads in the UK Speaking of windy roads. I've commented on Britain's questionable highway engineering and planning before (see here ). Seeing as the situation hasn't improved materially since our last visit to the UK, I feel obligated to comment on it again, albeit with some new thoughts.  The roads in the UK are terrible. In particular, the roads in these remote parts of the country are incredibly narrow and not always well maintained: They are riddled with potholes, a key concern for Hannah who was convinced that they would puncture our tires. Hannah kept our drives through the ...

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 Langu...

Bruton, UK - We spent a week wandering around (mostly) Somerset, in the UK. After hearing the details of my trip and seeing various photos, my mother told me that, "Not all of the UK is cute." To which I said and still say, "Prove it." Manors We visited several countryside manors in Somerset including Lytes Cary, Montacute Barrington Court, and Stourhead. These were the spectacular homes and gardens of Britain's aristocracy or landed gentry that were turned over to the National Trust as the wealth and power of these families diminished over the years.  Centuries ago, when the families were spending more freely on their estates, they built spectacular gardens and follies. Follies are (as my mother put it) big garden gnomes. More specifically (as Wikipedia put it), they are buildings constructed primarily for decoration, but suggest through their appearance some other purpose, or are of such extravagant appearance that they transcend the range of usual garden buil...