On The Road Again

When I visited Ketchikan, Alaska on work in the 1980's I saw people with T-shirts announcing "Ketchikaners don't tan . . . they rust". The town annually receives ~160 inches of precipitation. Anyone living in or visiting central Connecticut this spring would be justified wondering whether Ketchikan's climate has migrated to New England.

So this past Tuesday I set out for Prince Edward Island. While Jane is taking her class at Hartford Seminary it made sense for me to come Charlottetown to check on things at our house. In the morning it was actually warmish and partly cloudy. But by the time I got into Massachusetts it was raining again, as it did the rest of the drive.

I love the think time long drives provide. And there are amusements you just don't get at home. For instance, instead of watching a show on cable television, I got to view the RV's backup camera images. The black and white picture above was taken of the backup camera TV screen in the RV. Although its primary purpose is to assist in backing the vehicle and sometimes to maneuver between lanes, when towing the boat I can check to see that boat/trailer are behaving properly. This shot was taken around 3 in the morning while I was driving the 8 mile long Confederation Bridge to Prince Edward Island.

I'm delighted that Mabel Maynard deferred her time with Jesus and suggested that Jane take him with her on her sabbatical. I wanted a traveling companion for the trip to PEI [OK, yes, I have the dogs, Sophie and Dinah with me, and they're not "high maintenance", but I wanted a "no maintenance" companion as well]. Since Jesus was busy at school with Jane, I travelled with Anatole le Castor, a Canadian beaver I met at a Roots store in Charlottetown last year. Anatole has proved helpful, reminding me to stop and walk the dogs periodically, to stop and feed myself periodically, and to drive safely. He has also been doing additional trip research for me. You can see him boning up on Scottish travel highlights.

Today I will be scurrying around Charlottetown working out some trip details, such as whether or not I can use my Rogers Communications Blackberry in the UK, and if so whether a "bucket of minutes" is affordable.

In The Land Of Map Cuckoos

The Hassler side of White-Hassler comes from a long line of map cuckoos -- atlases, maps, gazetteers everywhere. So it is not surprising that my younger sister Marti thought it might be helpful if there were a way to show the relative size of Europe and the United States. She thoughtfully provided a map doing just that.

Using an atlas and almanac I found that Scotland is a bit smaller than Maine, and the United Kingdom, including Northern Ireland, is smaller than Arizona. By superimposing same scale maps [Arizona over Great Britain] you can see this.

Looking at it I recalled what Theo, granddaughter Ashley's beau who was born and raised in Holland, said at dinner Saturday evening, "I can't wait to get some of my friends from Holland over here. They simply have no idea how enormous the United States is." Looking at this map, I sense better where Theo's coming from.

Follow The Yellow Brick Roads -- Our Planned Routes Through Britain

[Click on maps to enlarge them]

We Had It Nailed From The Start

Over the past forty years I've devoted a lot of time to developing, running systems and teaching others how to the same. I've found as many different ways to design systems as there are people to design them -- each has to figure out what works best for them. I find that no matter how much pre-planning and intentionality to be linear in planning things, in short order things get delightfully, comfortably chaotic. The comfort comes from intuiting a holistic sense of what's happening and always being open to re-thinking or re-working something.

This happened quite a bit in planning our trip. Months ago Jane contacted the Iona Community and scheduled our stay. This was important because this is the centerpiece of the spiritual component of her sabbatical. So everything else would fit around that second full week in July. Since neither of us has traveled extensively in Great Britain and we have no idea how long it takes to get from place to place, we decided to give ourselves a few of days to get from Heathrow Airport to Iona. Since we would be on Iona for a week it didn't seem sensible to hire a car until after that visit -- we would take public transport from London to Glasgow, and on to Iona. Then the printed materials from Iona arrived in the mail. To get to Iona you have to ferry from the Scottish mainland at Oban to Craignure on the Isle of Mull. There is a jitney of some sort to get you from Craignure on the east side of Mull to Fionnphort on the west side, and it is Fionnphort from which you catch the ferry to Iona. In amongst all of these details was a note that the maximum weight your bag [note the singular form] must not exceed 55 lbs. Oh, and by the way, you need to bring your own towels and wash clothes, and you are well advised to bring rain pants and boots for getting around Iona. So we were faced with the perplex of having to add extra things to our "bag" at the same time we needed to pare down its weight. We entered a mental exercise space of absurd trip planning perhaps exceeded only by those backpackers who tear the paper tags from their tea bags to reduce weight.

Then, in the midst of all this wonderful mental chaos it struck me that we were going to lose at least two day's time traveling back to Glasgow to hire a car and then retracing our route north to explore the highlands. So what if we hired the car when we land at Heathrow? We could take the ferry from Oban to Craignure ourselves and tour Mull at our leisure. We could take as much bloody weight in our bags as the airline would permit [um, it's two bags per person, ~65 lbs each bag]. And the cost of leaving a hired car idle for a week is less than the recovered value of two travel days.

Stacy and Doug from church told us to avoid driving into London, as there are significant costs if you do so. This quickly decided us to return the hired car at Heathrow towards the end of our trip, take the Underground to our hotel, and use public transport to explore London and close in sites such as Canterbury Cathedral.

So the chaos returned to relative placidity. Ah, we had it nailed from the start!

Scotia vs. Nova Scotia

Jane and I have spent a lot of time exploring Nova Scotia and the other Maritime Canadian provinces. Anyone who's been to Cape Breton knows how spectacular it is when mountains jut up out of the water and merge with the sky. It is truly remarkable terrain.

So now, on our first trip to Scotland, we will learn how Nova Scotia's "motherland" compares.

This picture is of Jane enjoying a Cape Breton sunset, Summer 2008.

First Things First

The first thing Jane thought of when considering a sabbatical from Grace Episcopal Church, Newington, Connecticut was to spend time living in the Iona Community at Iona Abbey off the west coast of Scotland. As she thought about what it takes to travel to Scotland it struck her that it made sense to expand the trip and travel around the Scottish highlands. And if you're traveling through London, why not nip out to Canterbury? And why leave out Salisbury Cathedral, Winchester Cathedral, Durham Cathedral, Wells Cathedral, York Cathedral? The trip expanded to five weeks in Great Britain.

We will be on Prince Edward Island for a week or two before the trip, so we decided it made sense to fly from Halifax Airport in Nova Scotia rather than returning the the States. We found a bus service that will get us from Charlottetown to the Halifax Airport the day of our departure and return us to Charlottetown the day we return, so we won't have to park a car at an airport for five weeks.

Here's a rough picture of the trip:

Date	En route	Destination
7/7	Charlottetown, PE	Halifax, NS
7/8	Atlantic Ocean; London, UK	Glasgow, UK
7/9		Dervaig, Argyll
7/10	Mull	Bunessan, Argyll
7/11		Iona, Argyll
7/12		Iona, Argyll
7/13		Iona, Argyll
7/14		Iona, Argyll
7/15		Iona, Argyll
7/16		Iona, Argyll
7/17	Iona	Plocton, Scotland
7/18		Glendale, Skye
7/19		Stein, Skye
7/20	Western Highlands	Scourie, Sutherland
7/21	Durness; Scrabster	Stromness, Ornkey
7/22	Kirkwall; Skara Brae	Stromness, Ornkey
7/23	St. Margaret’s; John o’ Groats, Aberdeen	Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire
7/24	Dunnottar Castle; Dundee, Perth	Kinlochleven, Inverness-shire
7/25	Cairngorm; Inverness	Kinlochleven, Inverness-shire
7/26	Stirling; Falkirk	Stirling, Stirlingshire
7/27		Edinburgh
7/28		Edinburgh
7/29	Lindisfarne; Hadrian’s Wall; Durham	York, North Yorkshire
7/30		York, North Yorkshire
7/31	Burnley	Blenheim, Oxfordshire
8/1	Bath	Wells, Somerset
8/2	Glastonbury	Mousehole, Cornwall
8/3	Land’s End; Tintagel; Penzance	Mousehole, Cornwal
8/4	Stonehenge	Salisbury, Wiltshire
8/5	Winchester	Portsmouth, Hampshire
8/6		London
8/7		London
8/8		London
8/9		London
8/10		London
8/11	London; Atlantic Ocean; Halifax, NS	Charlottetown, PE

Because of my work schedules, up until now I've never been "away from home" for more than two or three weeks. We also realized that we would be traveling to Great Britain during peak tourist season. This meant shifting from the, "Where should we stay tonight?" mode of travel to the, "Let's see, we've got our reservation at the Mamore Lodge tonight. Phew!" Of course traveling to a place or region for the first time requires a lot of research to identify and vet places to stay. It took many, many hours of work for us to pull the itinerary and reservations together. But, remarkably, it is all in place. Now comes the next layer of planning -- what to pack? More on that later.