27 September 2005:
Morning:
We are in
Greenock, Scotland today. Scotland is an old Celtic word meaning cold, cloudy, windy, rainy place with no sunshine…..or
at least that seems to be the case today. Actually, the temperature is pleasantly in the upper 50’s and low 60’s.
This will seem like paradise to those of you in Texas where the temperature has been over 100 the last several days. But through
out the morning we’ve had rain followed by wind and rain followed by heavy rains followed by more wind and rain with
just an occasional break filled with enough sunshine to lure you out into the open so that you can be caught by the next cycle
of wind and rain. Greenock itself is a fairly small place with nothing much to recommend it except for a couple of old churches
and pubs. It is mainly a jumping off point for trips into Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Scottish lochs. We are headed to the
lochs later today. But this morning we dodged the rain and toured Greenock on foot to see a little local color. It turns out
that Scotland is populated by a tribe of people who speak a language that is somehow related to English, but not in any identifiable
way. I listened to several conversations on the street and in shops and I can honestly say that for all the words I could
understand the people could have been speaking Japanese…..no, wait, I actually know a few words of Japanese….these
people could have been speaking Inuit. The words sounded very much like the sounds you would get if you stuff a cat
into a blender and hit the button labeled ‘grind‘. But I know they were speaking some form of English because
many of them were wearing kilts and knee socks and trying to sell me souvenirs.
But a little rainy weather isn’t much to complain about. After we did our morning walk through town we came back onboard
the ship to dry out and have some lunch before heading out on our afternoon tour. While we were having lunch and watching
the port activity out the window of the dinning area we noticed an ambulance and police car pulling up to the dock and maneuvering
to the gangway. A team of paramedics grabbed a few bags of gear out of the back of the ambulance and ran up the gangway onto
the ship. A little while later they came down the gangway pulling a stretcher with a white-haired man on it. They loaded him
into the back of the ambulance and took off with lights flashing and the police car leading the way out of the port area.
So some guy’s cruise ended a little early with an unplanned stay in a Scottish hospital located in a small, rocky, windy,
rainy coastal town a long, long way from warm and sunny America. No, if a little rain is the only inconvenience I have to
suffer on this trip I’ll consider myself lucky……Just keep me out of foreign hospitals in cold and windy
lands.
Evening:
We have completed the “Panoramic Scottish Lochs” tour. I now understand
the code….if the tour has the word ‘Panoramic’ in the title that means that you will drive by the areas
of interest in your tour bus at speeds greater than 40 mph but less than 60 mph and the tour guide will tell you what you
would be seeing if it wasn’t raining, dark and dreary out your window. We left Greenock and quickly took the ferry to
Dunoon and motored past several Scottish lochs…Holy Loch, Loch Ekes, Loch Fynes, Loch Long, Loch Lomond to the town
of Luss where we actually stopped for an hour (I suspect that the tour guide had relatives who ran a souvenir shop in Luss)
to take pictures of the rain falling on a real Scottish loch. After that we loaded back into the bus for the ‘not-so-scenic’
drive back to Greenock and the ship. Interestingly enough, just as soon as we left the scenic lochs and got on the not-so-scenic
main highway toward Greenock the rain stopped and the sun came out and the day was crystal clear…..until we got to
the port and unloaded the bus when it began raining again with a vengeance.
The
Scots are an interesting people. They are proudly British, but dream of independence from England. Our tour guide was bragging
of Scottish participation on the British Olympic teams while telling an endless stream of anti-English stories which she would
end with a comment like: “only kidding, the English are our brothers”. However, the Scots, man, woman and child
do seem to have a sense of pride in one thing….their whiskey…..which they will talk about with knowledge, authority
and vigor at the slightest provocation. And which they will tell you is wildly over priced because 75% of the price of a bottle
of whiskey is due to taxes imposed by the damnedable English. At this point, I signed on to the “Free Scotland Movement”
myself. OK, so Tony Blair has been a good Ally in our war against terror and our democratization of the middle east (A.K.A.
the Bush Blood for Oil Invasions), but we’re talking about bringing the cost of a good single-malt Scotch down to a
level that I could afford….and that is serious stuff.
By the way, did I mention that Robert Burns,
the poet laureate of Scotland once wrote a poem that was an Ode to Haggis? Haggis….he wrote a love poem to oatmeal
and sheep guts boiled in a sheep’s bladder. Now how much whiskey is required to make you write a love poem to boiled
sheep guts? Let’s just say: A Lot.
We have just sailed out of continually rainy
Greenock and are enroute to Belfast, Northern Ireland. Where we hope the recent unpleasantness has ended and the afterglow
of IRA disarmament has left all parties feeling safe, secure and ready to be nice to foreign tourists.
