Epilog

So what did we learn from Wanderung 21? First, Scotland is a wonderful place to visit, primarily due to the hospitality of the Scottish people but secondarily also due to the scenery and history. Of course, being part Scottish helps, and probably biases, that assessment! The lowlands have a scenic mixture of dales and low mountains with picturesque small villages, farms, and grazing lands interspersed with woodlands. The highlands are quite a bit more austere in that all the mountains and much of the valleys are covered in heather and bracken. That uniform low, dark cover makes the rocky shapes of the terrain stand out vividly but in dark hues of green and black that give it a somber ambience. I liked that environment although I repeatedly had the thought of how in the world the Scots managed to wrest a living from such a harsh, barren land.

I found that driving the rural roads in Scotland was very stressful. In fact, on the narrowest 1-lane, 2-way "highways" with the occasional "passing places" (collision-avoidance wide spots!), I felt that the hair-trigger vigilance required to slam on the brakes and come to a screeching halt before having a head-on collision was of the same intensity as the vigilance level I use to check safety and guard against untoward events on the final approach and landing of an airplane. For me, at least, that is an extremely high level of cognitive effort and I found I simply could not maintain it for more than about 2 hours without a break of some kind. Cumulatively, for an entire day about 4-5 hours of that kind of driving was all I could take. Given that my speeds on those roads were quite low (for the first week I thought I'd never get out of third gear going 30 miles per hour!), the maximum distance I could drive in a day was correspondingly low, only 100-150 miles, which is laughable by U.S. standards.

One critical lesson I learned was that often the driving in Scotland was literally "a game of inches", which is to say I would be scraping the small kerb on the left side of a curve while a truck or bus was scaping by on my right. So if I do another driving tour I would rent the narrowest car possible. Seriously, I would ask the rental agency for the exact side-to-side width of the car. Similarly, the standard road map of Scotland doesn't really tell you the single most important thing you need to know, which is the side-to-side width of the pavement for a given stretch of road. Roads listed as "major" could vary from quite decent roads with two 10-foot wide lanes and paved shoulders to lane-and-a-half wide roads with no shoulders at all. It is for the latter roads that you need the narrowest possible car you can rent, or possibly a motorcycle in my case if I could find someone to rent me one.

An alternative way to tour Scotland would be to forgo driving altogether in favor of a bicycling or walking tour. After having some sudden, close, and completely unexpected encounters with bicyclists around blind curves or just over blind hills in Scotland, I just don't think bicycling is a safe alternative on any of the roads in Scotland that lack paved shoulders or a separate bike path, which is most of them! That would still leave the possibility of a walking tour, and that strikes me as a wonderful way to get a slow, detailed look at small sections of Scotland. My dream vacation, in fact, would be to walk one of the many hiking trails across Scotland such as the Southern Upland Way while stopping off at a "Bed and Breakfast" each night. But you have to take into account the quick changes in weather we experienced in Scotland that included dramatic changes in effective temperature as well as rain. Preferably for my dream walking tour I would carry just a minimal day pack with water, lunch, rain gear like a rain shell and waterproof hat, and cold-weather gear such as an ear-muff, gloves and sweater. If I could keep that all to an absolute minimum, I would hope to be able to walk between 10 and 20 miles per day, which would hopefully be enough to allow me to hopscotch from one B&B to the next. Maybe next time.

I wish we had more time to spend in England! We just drove around the "Lakes District" and it looked quite beautiful from afar. Helen and Jeff had spent quite a bit of time vacationing there and confirmed that it was a wonderful place to visit although they recommended staying away from the heavily touristed areas like Lake Windemere. They also showed me a book on walking in the southern Lake District written by A. Wainright that I thought was a charming guide to walking. Mr. Wainright spent years walking the trails in all areas of the Lake District and published detailed guides to the trails in each section. They looked invaluable to me but they also looked rather old and probably out of print so that locating a copy might be a problem.

Unfortunately, I found that the driving on secondary and tertiary roads in England was almost as strenuous as Scotland. While the roads themselves were often broader and better paved, the higher density of traffic using those roads often more than offset that advantage. Once again, I think renting a narrow car would be key to having those spare inches on either side that contribute so much to my peace of mind in many critical situations. As in Scotland, I would also consider a motorcycle that would give me even more of those spare inches, but again riding a bicycle would really seem to be unsafe on most of the rural roads.

Since we have previously taken a couple of bus tours of England and walked a bit around London, we really have seen most of the tourist sites. Therefore, I really would like to spend more time in England walking around in the back country, and I think there are official trails that could be easily used for that purpose. While driving in the southeastern corner of England, I saw signs alluding to a walk (South Downs Trail?) that might cross from Dover on one coast all the way to the Irish Sea. Similarly, I have heard of walking trails that wander across other areas of England. The only trick for a successful walking tour from my point of view would be finding sections of those trails that would have a Bed and Breakfast opportunity every 10 miles or so.

It was nice to see HMS Victory in Portsmouth, Hastings Battlefield, and Leeds Castle in the southeastern section of England. It was also wonderful to revisit Canterbury Cathedral again, which sentiment may surprise some of my friends and family. In fact, Canterbury Cathedral is the only church outside of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome that I have ever made the effort to visit twice. Most churches, like most tourist sites, are for me in the "visit once" category, and it is quite rare when something attracts me for repeated visits. Canterbury has a graceful loveliness in the main nave that I have just never experienced before, and it has such a variety of things to see beside that (crypt, shrine of Thomas a Becket, cloister area...), that it is hard to really take it all in during one visit.

The highlight of our cruise back from Dover to New York would have to be Iceland. What a weird, wonderful country. I enjoyed Althingvellir, Gulfoss, and Geyser very much and would like to see more of the natural beauties of rural Iceland. Since Iceland is fairly large and quite sparsely populated outside of the capital Reykjavik, I don't see how I could work out the type of walking tour I am hoping to do in Scotland and England, and the distances in Iceland also make a bicycling tour impractical, I think, so that leaves me with the option of a driving tour.

Fortunately, Icelanders drive on the right side of the road. Our guide, in fact, talked about the day in the early 1960s when Iceland together with Sweden and Norway switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. In Iceland, at least, that switch went without any problems or serious accidents at all, a fact that she considered astonishing. But Iceland is really a big island so driving around sections of it outside of Reykjavik would take some time. If Icelandic Airlines still allows a free, three-day layover option on flights between the U.S. and Europe, that would be one way to get enough time to maybe rent a car and quickly see a different corner of the country. However, the cost of living is quite high in Iceland, even for basic necessities such as food, so the costs of such an excursion might be more than we are used to incurring during car trips in, say, the U.S., Europe, or Australia.

So all in all we had a great time and hope to return to some areas and see them in more detail, but first we needed to return home and resume normal life for a bit!