6. You take the High Road and I'll take the Low...
Trip Start
Jun 17, ????
1
8
36
Trip End
Ongoing
Fort William,
United Kingdom
Tuesday, July 17, 1984
I went there back in the early eighties on a family holiday and we stayed in Arisaig in a static caravan. The people in th next caravan were family friends. In the other direction was a family from Glasgow, and they were rough as you like.
It was the middle of summer, so naturally the weather was horrible - cold and rainy. Just to rub it in, back home in the south of England they were enjoying a heatwave.
One day it was warm enough to swim and off we children went. My friend Nicky spotted a jellyfish - transparent (of course) with four mauve circles and (happily) no tentacles. Then my brother spotted one. The we reaslied that the b'stards were everywhere and fled the sea. Later, at low tide, the beach was thick with them, stranded I suppose by whatever current brough them all in. We went round the beach cutting their dead bodies in half with our metal spades. Why are children so disgusting? We were much nicer with the flat fish that we found - putting them in little pools and decorating them with seaweed. This was lovely until the Glaswegian children poured milk in the pools and killed all the fish (when we weren't there).
During our holiday my brother and his friend from the other family, Neil wanted to fish. Off we all went, and found a likely looking lake. The boys settled down with their diddy little rods and the rest of us milled about. Next thing we know, some red-faced Scottish man was yelling at us because *apparently* the lake belonged to some laird or other and we were upsetting his highly valuable salmon with our noise and children's fishing rods. He threatened all manner of hell breaking loose when the laird arrived, him being a mere 5 minutes behind so we chucked the rods back in the family minibus and moved on..
As part of the trip we did get to enjoy both Loch Ness and Loch Lomond. The latter involved a lot of singing and the former involved all the boys throwing rocks in "surreptitiously" every two minutes and shouting "did you see that? It was Nessie, really!!"
In recent years I have visited Scotland again on business - Glasgow and Edinburgh. Edinburgh is particularly nice and hopefully I'll get the chance to visit it properly one day.
Comments
Memories from Keith
I remember having two days of sunshine, the day we arrived and the day we left. There were three Islands Egg (spelt wrong), muck and rum (probably spelt wrong too) which we could see on the occasional break in the clouds. I think we went to the foot of Ben Nevis at Fort William. In Arisaig, the locals were about as welcoming as the Arctic sea which it felt like we were swimming in. Being a rock geek, I'd love to go back for the geology and to give some of the locals some cheek, but on my list of places to re-visit this on comes second to last (above Moss Side)
The Islands
Ah, how could I have forgotten Eigg, Muck and Rhum? (Not sure about the spelling either!)
caravan and jellyfish
i think the 'rough Glaswegians' in the next caravan were on some kind of shagafon, which given the weather was probably fair enough. I seem to remember that another form of entertainment was throwing the jelly fish in the air with a spade so that the a couple of local dogs would jump in the air and eat them- now that was fun.
Re: caravan and jellyfish
Yup, those memories really make you feel proud....