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Bill & Liz's Excellent Adventure
We wanted a second honeymoon. We got more than we bargained for.
Liz Curtis Higgs | posted 9/12/2008
 2 of 3
We also saw signs posted near farms advertising "free range chickens," which made us wonder if they laid "free range eggs" that customers gathered in "U-pick" fashion.
Oddly, neither lamb nor chicken appeared on most Scottish menus. Haggis, maybe, but not chicken breast. The man I'd honeymooned with the first time had insisted on meatloaf and fries. But this ten-year veteran of my feeble attempts at cooking has learned to eat anything and smile about it. He ordered mackerel (not holy) served as a pate on oatcakes. Pate? My Bill? We have definitely moved beyond Denny's.
Our only culinary challenge was that Bill's a coffee drinker. Bad form in a land of tea pots. Every cup of java he drank was worse than the last one, and thick enough to blacken his teeth. We should've brought our own Maxwell House.
And our own umbrellas. After all, we'd heard Mel Gibson say, "It's good Scottish weather—the rain is falling straight down." Where were our heads? In the rain, that's where. It showered on our first honeymoon, too, but we cuddled under one small umbrella and thought it all very romantic. Now we were cruising for a Woolworth's (and found one), where we could each buy our own golf-course-type umbrellas.
The edge of town wasn't marked by convenience stores and car dealerships, just sheep grazing by the fence, on the road, under our car.
Most of our 1,350-mile adventure was spent on one-lane roads, which seemed to be created by pouring asphalt out at the top of a hill and letting it find its own way to the bottom. Imagine driving in the rain at twilight, with an ancient stone wall on one side, a sheer cliff leading to a loch hundreds of feet below on the other side, two nursing lambs with their mother in the middle of the road, and a car coming from the opposite direction, driving faster than, ah, might be prudent.
The most frequently heard phrase in our car was "Wha-a-a-a!"
Soon, though, we got the hang of it. Turn-outs along absurdly narrow roads allowed one car to pull aside while the other passed by. Very civilized, really. When oncoming motorists blinked their lights, it meant, "I'll wait, you go first." Or as we Kentuckians translate it, "Y'all come on ahead."
The urban routes were more dangerous. Arrows were painted on the road to show us when to merge, which was very disconcerting when we found them pointed straight at us. Traffic circles had us spinning around and going back in the direction we'd already traveled. Routes were rarely marked, with mere finger signs at intersections pointing in six different directions and written in Gaelic.
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