Conference

Not much exciting has been happening for me since the conference has started. I've mostly been studying/reading, although I have done some exploring in the town. Last night it looked like it was going to be a good sunset, so I hoofed over to the castle/cathedral area to take some pictures. It wasn't quite as good of a sunset as I hoped, but, I did get some good pictures with my camera. I only took one digital, and it's a little blurry, but you can see it.

We have met lots of interesting people from universities all over the world. I've been able to eat meals with the attendees, so it's been fun to meet them all. This afternoon there's free time for them, so Amy and I will tour the above cathedral and castle, and I might talk her into the Himalayas—a mini-golf attached to the St. Andrews Links Club.

Sorry to put word verification on the comments pages. Unfortunately, a spammer had left comments on every post, so, hopefully that will help alleviate that problem. As far as I'm concerned, spammers and their bots can reside in Cocytus.

Amy's paper

It went very well! People were very interested, and asked lots of questions, and kept her back for more discussion after it was over. She was happy with how it turned out, and very relaxed now.

St. Andrews is pretty nice, although jammed with tourists. It's a little hard to walk into some of the shops because they're so full. It seems that it's mostly golf tourists. The Old Course, which costs about £140 to play, has tee times from 4:45 a.m.-7 p.m. or so. But, there's several other courses in town, too. There's also, of course, the ruined cathedral (thanks, John Knox), the castle, and several other sites to see. I've felt a little funny because so far I've spent most of my time studying instead of seeing the town.

I decided to post a short video of a ruined castle on Loch Carron, if you want to download it. Be warned, if you're using dial-up it will probably take a while (it's 1.6MB), even though it's been compressed and the quality reduced! Click here for it.

A couple more pics

As requested, here's a picture of our car. It's from the first day while in Renfrewshire, so, notice the circles under my eyes:
And, here's our room at Ardullie:


I'll post as soon as I can after Amy's paper today. I'm sure it will go well.

Day Five

Our breakfast at Craighall was really good, also. It included, besides the normal fare, haggis, which was a new experience. Upon leaving Craighall, we walked through Blairgowrie, the cute town nearby. There wasn’t too much to see, so we went on to the town Dunkeld, which is owned by the Scottish historic trust. We saw their amazing cathedral, which is still the parish church. Christians have been worshiping there since the 6th century. However, the main nave was left to ruin in the Reformation, so it is in a state of disrepair. We did find a gravestone listing Jane Beveridge—the Beveridges were from this area.

We left Dunkeld and started heading towards St. Andrews, and stopped off at the medieval chapel of St. Athanase. It was extensively modified by the Victorians, but the altar area was still original—it was begun in 1187. We finally made it to St. Andrews and checked into our hotel. It was a hot day in St. Andrews, reaching about 75. The dinner provided by the conference was quite good, and afterwards we attended a concert in Holy Trinity church of renaissance and baroque choral music and some organ interludes, which was quite nice.

Day Four

We had an interesting night and breakfast at Ardullie, with some really excellent eggs—they were a pure breed of chicken there on the grounds, and the yolks were really dark. We left and went to a Victorian spa village, Strathpeffe. It was a cute town, although several things were closed on Mondays. We tried to go the internet café, whose hours said 10-8, but when we walked in, the chairs were on the table and the owner said they’d be opening at 12:30. I guess posted hours don’t really mean that much.

We headed to Inverness and walked around downtown there. It’s a pretty big city, with some nice architecture (like several of the churches), although none of it is incredibly old (apparently, it was destroyed several times). We had some great Thai food, but couldn’t find any internet access anywhere except the public library, at which there was over an hour wait. So, we headed on to see Loch Ness.

It was pretty, but we took the southern route instead of the normal tourist north route, and therefore drove for a long time on single-track roads and wandered through the forest after seeing the loch. We finally made it back through some beautiful farm country to a main road, and headed down to Aviemore, a ski resort town in the Cairngorms. It was pretty touristy, but we did get an amazing cup of coffee and internet access.

We went on to Craighall Castle, for our final B&B. It was a stunning location, on a huge estate. We stayed in the French bedroom, which had a lovely canopy bed and overlooked a rushing river, some 150 feet below.

Day Three

We had the same breakfast as before, although this time with grilled tomatoes instead of mushrooms—again, it was all really good. There were also 2 other guests, a German woman and a woman from London who were friends and on holiday. We got the scoop on the town churches, and went to the “most laid-back” one, that our landlady thought would be most comfortable to Baptists. There was a Free Church, a Free Presbyterian Church, and the one we attended, the Church of Scotland. It was a really enjoyable service. The first thing we were handed was a Psalter, for which I was glad, but it came with Mission Praise, which was their hymnal supplement of newer songs. The only song we knew that we sang was “Give Me Oil in my Lamp Keep Me Burning,” but we also sang the tunes NOEL and something else vaguely familiar.

The sermon was good, based directly out of Psalm 8, and very evangelical. The pastor, his wife, and the keyboardist had to run after the service to go to the 12:30 service at another church in their parish, about an hour away. We headed out after church for Applecross, over the highest road in Britain, and all one-lane. It was a fun, although tough drive, but there were amazing views from the top. Once we got into Applecross, we had lunch at the only inn in town (fish and chips—the best, I think), and then started heading north around the peninsula.

That drive was even more amazing, with cliffs going right into the ocean, ancient stone houses, sheep everywhere, views of the open North Sea, and then some snow-capped mountains. It was truly the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.

It was then a long drive to cut across towards Inverness and Dingwall, where are next B&B is, Ardullie House. It’s a very interesting house, built in 1669 by the Monroe family on a large manor. It’s in the midst of being remodeled, and is not actually the cleanest house we’ve ever been in. But, it’s really cool, being so old, and the landlady, whose maiden name was Fane, has all her old family portraits up, including one of Richard Cromwell (Oliver’s son), and another who robbed the queen’s bowrie, but whose name I don’t remember. We had dinner at a pub with only locals, and then read outside for a while, surrounded by too many rabbits to count. We tried to go to Tesco (the Wal-Mart equivalent), and, while the sign said 24 hours, it is open M-Sat 8 a.m.-10 p.m. and Sunday 9 – 8.

Day Two

We received an absolutely amazing breakfast of cereal, sausage, bacon, toast, eggs, mushrooms, and amazingly good coffee. It was interrupted, however, by a pod of dolphins that came up to play along the shore (one of the neighbors called to apprise us of them). After our breakfast, we left to head north along the coast. We stopped in Oban, a fairly major town along the west to do some shopping. Amy was glad to find the £ Store. We met a MacDougall who directed us towards a Priory where the MacDougall chiefs were buried from the 11th-13th centuries. We drove around and finally found it, but there was a charge to enter and we felt like we should keep heading north, so, we didn’t go in.

We then stopped in Fort William, another fairly major town, and looked around for a while, admiring the Scottish Episcopal Church in town and doing some tourist shopping. We also took a look at a ruined castle outside of town from the 15th century, Inverlochy Castle.

We kept driving north through some beautiful country, and finally arrived in Lochcarron. Our B&B, Lotta Dubh, was actually a bit south of town through some one-lane roads, but when we got there, it was even nicer than the first night’s, although the view wasn’t as nice and the curtains weren’t as heavy—so the all-night light was a little disturbing.

We went back to Lochcarron for dinner at a local pub/inn, and had some really good fish and chips. Again, the people were really nice and helpful. On our way back, after 10, we stopped at another ruined castle, this one destroyed in the early 17th century. It was extremely picturesque, set right on the loch.

Day One

After sitting on the tarmac for 2 hours in Newark, our flight was fairly smooth, although they left the lights on for the first 3 hours while trying to sell us duty-free perfume, and after that, the TVs were left on, so, we didn’t really sleep at all on it. Since we took off so late, we had about 30 minutes when we landed in Birmingham to go through customs and run to, of course, the opposite end of the airport. We made it fine, and our second flight was just 40 minutes.

Landing in Glasgow, we of course discovered that our luggage did not make the connection. We got our car (a Vauxhall, because we got a free upgrade), and drove around downtown Glasgow, although we could never find any parking, so we left the city for Renfrewshire, just outside of town near the airport. Here’s the town hall.

We went back to airport at 3, and our luggage did make the next flight, so we gathered it up and headed towards the coast, through Trossachs National Park. It was a beautiful drive, and driving on the left is not too difficult. We stopped a few times along the way for coffee (since we hadn’t slept), and discovered that the Scottish people are just incredibly friendly! Everyone asked all about us, even in Renfrewshire, and were very helpful in every way possible.

We arrived at Traguhaine at about 7, and Fiona, our hostess, told us about a couple of restaurants in town that serve dinner (a town of 14, mind you—the red building in this view from our room is one). She said it was about a 30 minute walk, so, after showers, we started to head over. We got probably ½ a mile and seemed no closer, so I talked Amy into getting our car, for which we were grateful—it was over 2 miles to get there, and over some incredibly steep hills!

We had a lovely dinner and met the owners, who were themselves the nicest folk (2 of the 14 residents), looked at a Celtic cross there (posted by the McDougalls—ancestors of the McDowells), and came back to our room to enjoy the sunset at 10:00! In fact, it never got dark all night because of the northern latitude.

Ready to Go!

IMAG0330, originally uploaded by lapeeler.

Well, we're leaving tomorrow, and I wanted to check the photo uploading capabilities. While we're in the Highlands, we may not be able to update the blog too much. But, Inverness should have some places, and of course St. Andrews will. So, we're really excited!

A Calendar

As requested by the visual learners, here's a calendar for your perusal. It will not be localized to whatever time zone you're located, so it's 5 ahead of the East Coast, 6 Central, etc. You can also "subscribe" to it if you're a Google calendar user with the following button: