Musings

Sometimes, in the changing of the guard and the ebb and flow of inhabitants here, there’s no real evidence of change, except the people are gone. Here are watchdog chairs, awaiting the return of their masters. If anthropomorphized.

In contrast to yesterday’s crashing surf, the breeze today came from a different angle, and the dock was, essentially, becalmed. Still, I looked for leeches. None near the lake-edge.

I didn’t go in to look farther (and tempt fate).

Posted at 10:25 PM | Comments Off on Human-scale, temporary

We crossed many bridges today. Uncounted. Including two very large ones.

This is a large free one, with an extremely checkered construction history. The internet indicates that the latest problem has been “bridge bearings.” I wonder what they are.

This one is a toll (not tool) bridge, also high enough that lake freighters can pass beneath safely. This one has not been plagued by construction problems, but during the summer you can assume that one lane (aka carriage-way) each way will be closed to make room for the workers and equipment necessary to repaint exposed metal, including underneath the vehicles.

Unusual in our experience, only two cash toll (not tool) booths were open. There’s now a transponder option, also two lanes, but I didn’t see a single vehicle do that while we were in line. Times change slowly?

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

Out in the wee hours, with the chipmunks and the robins…I found this plastic fence almost glowing in the streetlight. Turns out the English word picket is from the French piquet, meaning pointed stake. Pike, as in the defensive weapon, is a related word. And the fish is so named for its pointy jaw.

The other day we enjoyed pesto from our Genovese basil. Tonight, we feasted on Thai basil added to Thai curry sauce, hauled home from TJ’s.

These are among the quotidian topics at this ranchero. Meanwhile, the country has moved a bit forward with grieving in Charleston, ending the escapees’ travel plans in NY state, and a(nother) Supreme Court ruling I didn’t expect (feeling very cynical about some members of that bunch; yea! for majority rule).

Posted at 7:57 PM | Comments Off on Night moves

When I was taking this picture, I liked the various shapes, rounded and straight, repeated and random, best. When I downloaded it and looked at it “big,” I liked the reflection of the sky best. Now, maybe I like the dark red top of the narrow vase best—and the companion piece back by the fence.

Posted at 7:04 PM | Comments Off on Look…and look again

Spotted this airplane-car with the lovely fender-fairings tucked back in this yard and had to smile—what dynamic design.

Posted at 7:31 PM | Comments Off on Background foregrounded

One benefit of enduring (embracing) the east-to-west time change is that I’m awake pretty darned early. Given that this week the highs are predicted to be in the mid-90s, early is required for endurable (outdoor) exercise. So, I was out well before the sun brought much light to the sky, and all the night-security lights still lit up…even this venerable bar (aka pub).

Posted at 9:43 PM | Comments Off on Pabst everywhere

Turns out we are B people; turns out B on this train is the quiet car…nice! The train-cars on this long-distance route (London–Edinburgh, I think) have alphabetical designations A through F, plus K and I forget what else. The Guru found mid-day, off-time tix for us for £13 apiece each way, London–York—a great deal!

While northbound our car, and I think the train in general, was lightly occupied; southbound, today, there were only a few empty seats. We got lucky, and only had companions at our table for about a half-hour of the ride, an older couple en route to visit their daughter in Sardinia for a month….

The Henry Moore Arch, with a display-management strategy that imitates Stonehenge, where the hoi palloi are kept at bay by fences. Rabbits, however, at least here, were dining by the half-dozen on the edge of the fenced-off greensward. (Would not normally use that word, but it fits here in London….)

We’re staying in a “new” neighborhood, near Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. They are one contiguous green on my smartphone map with two named zones, confusing…plus I found this on an official website: “Kensington Gardens covers 242 acres and was originally part of Hyde Park.”* We strolled in both, after an early dinner….

We started at the Italian Gardens, where we began to discover heavy use across the park at this hour by Iranian(?) couples and small groups. The women tended to accent black with florescent or bright orange, e.g., in sneakers. Is this some kind of nationalism? A signal of availability? Mystery….

This Royal Park celebrates many royals, including this relief of Queen Victoria in the Italian zone. The quoted price of making the stone sculptures in the Italian Garden was around £200, if I remember correctly. Not sure what that is in modern £s.

Check out this giant installation honoring a gold-crusted Prince Albert. He’s seated in a style we saw the Romans use, and I assume they borrowed/imitated from the Greeks. For the Romans anyway, seated on a special chair was a big deal for the leaders. I don’t know if it carried more status than seated on a horse, or if it was a different connotation entirely (e.g., referring to non-military leadership?).

Anyway, the sheer extent of this park in such a populous city is amazing. After all the cities we visited in Scotland, almost all with a castle on a high point, London’s layout, on comparatively flat ground, feels quite different.

* Apparently, in 1536 good ol’ Henry VIII created the park as a private/crown hunting ground. It was opened to proper members of “the public” (thus, only the few) in 1637.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Moving on…

Mostly, today’s theme was windy. With rain. Not mist. The big drops—Rain with a capital R.

We have used Miss Voice and blue-dot navigation throughout our trip. The way G**gleMaps is set up, the voice informs of a pending roundabout, with which “exit” to take. This is almost always accurate (unless there’s new construction), but the thing that confounds us is that when you are in the roundabout, you are told to exit on a certain named street. It is a rare roundabout that has a street name. Route numbers, towns, yes; but no street names. This custom/programming choice introduces confusion….

This morning we had an unexpected two-fer. We set out for the soundstage where Outlander (Starz version) is being shot. It’s in that grey-blue building in the center-background. The trucks area gate was open, but the walk-up/reception gate was locked up tight. There was a special instruction sign for people who came for costume fittings.

Here’s the two-fer part. We tried an escape out the back of the industrial park that became a dead-end, and…found a sign…for the Antonine Wall! (I said no more Romans…oops.) Yup, I could see the wall ditch, etc. extending each way from the sign, left and right at this angle. A fine surprise!

We also made a fast stop to see the market street of Kilsyth. This is another town where the Livingstons of a dozen generations back in my ancestry lived. It was then called Monyabroch (ca. 1500s).

The bar—excuse me: pub to the right is called the Scarecrow. Would sometime love to hear the story behind that! (Another pint, please!)

Regarding the sign to the left, how confusing is it for a butcher shop to list a cut of meat for XYZ pounds per pound (that is £XYZ per pound).

We parked just off Market Street at Market Square, very lucky to find a space on a rainy morning…. Note that this alley leading upward is named U.P. LANE. It leads up to U.P. ROAD. Both may refer to United Presbyterian (church). No one making internet entries seems to be sure. I took it as a ghostly link to descendants of the Livingstons with connections to way northern Michigan….

Let’s wrap this with some architecture bits….

Unusual bridge in Glasgow…a single arch that crosses over the carriageway deck.

More red sandstone…like St. Andrews Cathedral, and many, many more buildings. I haven’t seen any quarries identified as for this stone, but there must be big holes out there where it all came from…. I don’t know if I’ve been seeing façades etc. of Old Red Sandstone or New Red Sandstone—or both. I think both are common outcrops….

Fine lighthouse…we bagged joining the locals spending their Saturday at venues we had some interest in, and visited a mall (Starbucks) and drove along the Firth of Clyde, then more of the Firth of Clyde…. So we saw many navigation features on land and sea, breaking waves (splash!), and even a spot of sunshine. It came out when we were just past this lighthouse…brilliant for maybe four minutes….

Just one more of those “original” or “first place in Scotland” comments…. We’re overnighting in Ayr. Scotland’s first parliament was held here in 1315, lead by Robert the Bruce (aka Robert de Brus, in Norman), who ruled from 1306–1329. He’s the one who won at Bannockburn, where we began our day, in 1314….

Also, Ayr is often listed as the birthplace of the poet Robert Burns. It was really in Alloway, but that village is now in the Ayr metro area…so I guess it’s all the same….

Posted at 4:45 PM | 2 Comments »

In the tourist propaganda, you see Arbroath called the birthplace of Scotland. This abbey was founded in 1178 by monks from Kelso, one in the Roxburgh border-abbey cluster. It took decades to build and the soft sandstone used for carved stone detail has become greatly eroded. Arbroath Abbey became the wealthiest in Scotland, and that was probably partly why it hosted a gathering in 1320 that composed the Declaration of Arbroath, which set forth Scotland’s independence from England, and finally was signed by Edward III of England in 1328. This was very early in his long reign, which lasted from 1327 to 1377. Of course, by the 1330s, Edward was invading Scotland…ah, the conflicts have gone on and on between these two groups….

We enjoyed the town of St. Andrews more than we expected…. We looked at the castle from afar, admiring its “corner lot” above the sea. The tide was out…and this huge rectangular pond revealed…we never figured it out…. In the 1300s the castle was controlled alternately by Scotland and England, and in the 1400s it was held by Scotland. The later history…rather brutal….

We wandered among the ruins of the cathedral, another one with bodies and headstones planted where the building used to be…. This was the east end of the church, looking at the inside of the wall behind the altar. I was surprised how stable this huge section looked, even without the side walls it used to have.

If I remember correctly, this was the back wall of one side of the monastery’s courtyard. I loved the row of benches anchoring it in the present.

Speaking of the present, we found this fellow doing sign-maintenance on a high ladder at a main corner in old-town, near the University.

Also, JCB spotted this rooftop humor…. That is one UGLY rat…it is a rat, isn’t it? Not two cats?

St. Andrews was not our only stop…we also climbed into nearly every accessible nook and cranny of this nearly-unchanged-since-Medieval-days castle, which you may recognize if you’re a Starz Outlander fan…. The real world calls it Doune Castle, and most of the construction we see dates to the late 1300s. Movie-makers have visited here with their cameras for decades…including for the Elizabeth Taylor version of Ivanhoe (released in 1952); Monty Python and the Holy Grail, shot in 1974; and the Game of Thrones TV series….

The title does NOT refer to the Guru and me…in either order….

Posted at 5:05 PM | Comments Off on Very vs mildly dilapidated

This is a new term I’ve learned, and it means, rainy, cold, windy, and generally unpleasant outdoor conditions…. And that was what we had today.

I have neglected to mention that we had several lovely days with ShedMan and CheetahWoman…lots of laughing and good times. Today, however, that came to an end….

CheetahWoman had told us about a magical cemetery island she found in the River Snizort, and we were going right by, and so stopped in. Despite the rain and many cow-pies, we discovered a sliver of the magic she had observed in the fading light of day (no rain).

Given that it was in the high 40s (F) in the valleys, it’s not surprising that at elevated elevations, the precip was white. I think there’s new dusting atop remnant snowpack from last winter….

I really loved the narrow long chutes of water the mountains were shedding…. More a result of the rubbish weather….

In light rain (still rubbishy), we checked out the Caladonian Canal (along the Great Glen Fault), which we paralleled for part of the day….

We finished up our touristing with a quick visit to Old Inverlochy Castle, which is in pretty good shape for dating back to about 1280. This view is through both gates, all the way across the interior courtyard. It had round towers in each corner, and the wall bases and part of the walls remain outlining the exterior walls and towers. The huge rounded stones are different than in stonework we’ve seen so far.

Finishing a day of rubbish weather is uplifting….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 3 Comments »