sir_guinglain

A quiet day. I didn't sleep so I didn't feel very ambitious this morning. D had to work so I was happy to keep quiet and admire him at the kitchen table with his computer glasses and his headset on. At home he works in his own little room with his back to the door so it was kinda fun to just see him at work. Once he did the finger-snap/finger-guns thing that I recognize as meaning he's managed to do something satisfying on the computer; that was nice to see.

This afternoon V and I went for a little walk around: to An Lanntair ("The Lighthouse," an arts centre) where we bought fridge magnets and socks and admired sculptures wrapped in the distinctive red stripey foil from Tunnocks teacakes, how Scottish can you get. Then on to the sporting goods store, where I bought a t-shirt with a cute line drawing of blackhouses on it; it says "Western Isles." We admired them in the window the other day when the store was closed. They have one with a black pudding too but that isn't nearly as well-drawn or as appealing to me.

We went to Argos quickly to get a hand pump for the tires on V's new rollator, which turned up not long before we left home so this is its first outing. They're very happy with it as the bog-standard one they had before wasn't suited to their needs and caused almost as much pain to use as it alleviated. But one of the things that makes this one better is that it has pneumatic tires, rather than hard rubber ones; they'll absorb some of the shock rather than transferring it directly to poor V's arms. But we hadn't had a chance to pump up the tires before we left and V thought one of them needed it, hence the cheap pump. At home we have an automatic thing that we can use to pump up car and bike tires but we didn't bring it. Once we had the pump, V sat down on a bench outside Argos and I attempted to inflate the tires. They were all in pitiful condition and I marveled that the thing had been as useful for V as it has been. I ended up having to crawl around and just sit on the cool paving slabs to connect the pump, ha. Right there on the high street, I bet we'll be the talk of the town. I know how little it takes to do that in a small town -- I didn't realize quite how small but I just looked it up on Wikipedia and it's under seven thousand people. I feel like I've run into all of them the three times I've been at Tesco since we got here.

We failed to find the temporary location of a store that is run by someone from Minnesota who ended up here, which is the one thing remaining that the others have mentioned really hoping I get to see while I'm here. We have better intel now on exactly where it is, thanks to visiting V's son this evening (and thus I also got to finally meet his tuxedo cat Sam, who I've seen many many photos and videos of). So maybe we can manage that tomorrow, along with a plan to go to the castle. It's our last day here; I'm gonna miss it so much.

Sadly V wasn't well enough to go out with us today, but D and I went to see the Calanais standing stones and the broch Dùn Carloway.

Things so old, no one knows why they're like they were. Why use so much timber in a place with so few trees? Why build it so high?

The broch is 2000 years old and the stones were put there 5000 years ago, longer ago than the time since. And no one knows quite why. These things that will seem precious and exotic to the people on the big cruise ships that dock at Stornoway are so ordinary to the locals that V told me about a house they nearly bought when they lived on the island that had some standing stones on the property so one of the things to be aware of is that people might inadvertently wander through your yard.

Once when my parents were visiting, my mom gushed on the train back from Chester (I think, unless it was York) how neat it is that Ing-ga-land has all this hiss-tree until she said something like "We don't have anything like this at home" and I couldn't help but say something about how that was because of the genocide and colonialization. She changed the subject then.

I had to learn about things like Cahokia all by myself, we didn't get that in school!

We got to our lovely Airbnb flat not long after 9 this evening.

The day started with a fire alarm in our hotel at 7:20am, which didn't feel like a great start -- though at least it stopped while we were still sleepily pulling on enough clothes to go outside. And, more importantly, it gave D the chance to check right away if he could book an earlier sailing than Saturday. And he could! This afternoon! So it was nice to have some good news first thing...even if this booking was of course immediately followed by the same automated text he got yesterday about how the sailing could be canceled at short notice because of the weather.

D and I got up for breakfast, I had tasty mushrooms and eggs and was introduced to the tattie scone which immediately enters the small pantheon of potato products I'm actually excited to see (I'm usually pretty indifferent to them) because it was amazing.

We took some breakfast back for V, D told his boss why he wouldn't be working today as planned, and we all got ready to go just in time for checkout at 11. We hung around for a lovely walk in the grounds of the hotel with V pointing out bugs on the flowers and even picking up some lichen that they knew had fallen off the trees (very tall, with lots of what even I could recognize as Douglas firs along many other massive old trees) to let me see and touch it. It's so lovely how they carefully describe what I can't see so I can enjoy all the flora and fauna that they do.

After sharing a restorative pot of tea in the hotel bar, we went literally down the road to what had been the Strathpeffer Spa train station and is now a café, gift shop, and the Highland Museum of Childhood, all of which were great.

I am fascinated by Strathpeffer as a name, and not just because I find it impossible to say (it always goes wrong when I get to -thp-!). It finally got me to look up the word strath which I figured out from context clues would be something Gaelic to do with a river and sure enough. "Peffer" feels so German to my Minnesotan brain, and I noted Strathpeffer being described as "the most un-Scottish of Scottish towns...variously compared to Harrogate in Yorkshire and to a Bavarian mountain resort." But that's just a coincidence; Bavarian perhaps in architecture but not in name. According to what I can find about how the place got its name, it and the other "Peffer streams" ("Peffer occurs as a burn name in Inverpeffray (Crieff), and there are two Peffer burns in Athelstaneford (Haddington), also a Peffer Mill at Duddingston...") are "likely to be connected with the root seen in Welsh ‘pefr’, beautiful, fair; ‘pefrin’, radiant; ‘pefru’, to radiate."

Anyway. We enjoyed the museum, bought treats in the shop (mostly for me: fingerless gloves in a Fair Isle knitted pattern, socks with space designs on them, and a fancy bar of chocolate, but V got a teeny cute thing of some kind which they'd picked up and said "I'm turning into an old person, I'm collecting tchotchkes!" as they held it up). We had lunch at the café, with the help of an adorable spaniel who flopped right down like he'd been our dog forever, who turned out to be called Fudge and worked hard for the teeny crusts of cheesy bread I gave him and a bit of tuna mayonnaise from V's sandwich. He's well known to the café staff, who told us his name.

From there we went to Ullapool, still hopeful for the ferry, and with an hour to kill looked in the bookstore and some touristy stores where I was told how nice a £150 wool sweater would look on me, and bought some boring stuff at Boots (my eczema has been hellish lately because I've been so stressed, and also I bought my own razor now that I need one!) before sitting by the harbor watching the boats and the gulls and just having a nice time until it was time to head back to the car which we'd left in line for the ferry. Even as we were driving on to the boat I was trying not to let myself get too relieved, remembering the RVs I saw having to drive back off again yesterday with the last-minute cancellation. But it was fine.

We went up on to the deck to watch the ferry leave the harbor, had dinner (I was tempted by Calmac and cheese but I'd just had mac and cheese for lunch and thought I could use slightly more variety in my diet so went for a veggie burger and salad) and then sat in the "observation lounge" where there was increasingly less to observe as we got away from the islands near shore and also it got dark but we had relatively comfy seats and everyone was tired by then. I didn't sleep but listened to an audiobook and rested my eyes.

And like I said we got to Stornoway slightly delayed but otherwise fine, it was a very smooth crossing -- V was surprised how much so --and since we're staying in the same flat those two had last year they know the location and the layout and everything, it was the easy welcome we needed.

We hauled our stuff inside and have done various things to make ourselves feel at home: D has set up his PS5 to do his daily tasks in the couple of games he's playing, V put away the food we brought, I had a shower. D and I have also had a bit of a bottle of cherry wine I was won over by yesterday thanks to the copy on the label:

Luxury cherries from Blairgowrie make this thrilling wine a cherrylicious event.
Rich and moist, dark and silky, Little Red Riding Hood lost in the Black Forest.
Van Morrison was always going on about Sweet Cherry Wine, in an unrelated incident.

We bought it yesterday, saying we'd have it when we got to our flat that evening, and then of course we didn't. It tasted great tonight.