Leap of Faith

Planning a trip to places you’ve never visited is always a tricky business. You can read travel guides. You can peruse online advertisements and reviews. You can listen to friends’ experiences. But ultimately you have to take a leap of faith and make some bookings. Yesterday morning Jane and I boarded the Northlink Ferry in Stromness, Orkney, sailed to Scrabster on the Scottish mainland, and then drove south through Aberdeen to Stonehaven. Along the coast we saw some North Sea oil platforms and offshore wind turbines. Stonehaven is a small town on the Scottish coast that promised to be utterly charming. Driving to Aberdeen took much, much longer than we had anticipated, and we arrived in Stonehaven 7:00 pm. As you can see from pictures, it is indeed a picturesque town. And since we’ve both gotten bitten by the Scottish lighthouse bug and the role of the Stevenson family in engineering them, we were delighted to find that Robert Stevenson visited Stonehaven in 1812 and advised the town council to blast a large rock that had been making access to part of the harbor (the part in front of our B&B) difficult, and to build an additional jetty (the one we walked on that evening).

However, I was a bit disappointed because on that Thursday evening the town was crawling with tourists. Having been in remote parts of the Scottish Highlands, we had gotten spoiled and we had come to expect sole or nearly sole presence wherever we travelled.

Today we visited Dunottar Castle and some Aberdeen sites that have remarkable significance to the Episcopal Church, especially the Connecticut Episcopal Church. Jane will recount those experiences. Let me just say that, as houseboy/tour arranger, I redeemed myself by my selection of Mamore Lodge Hotel in Kinlochleven. Getting here takes some real doing. Since a bridge was built across the mouth of the loch several years ago, folks don’t have to drive by the private road to the Lodge. And once we did find the private road it was an arduous drive up a narrow single-lane road to the lodge. But once we arrived, ah, what splendid reward we received! You can judge the view yourself from pictures from the window of our room and of the wonderful, wood-paneled room itself (we are in the King Edward VII room, as he was a regular visitor in his day). The hotel could use some real sprucing up – it’s definitely out of the mainstream today, but it is an awesome [I know, I know how overworked that term is, but in this case it is apt] place for us to stay two evenings.

Information about the Lodge was not contained in any of the four or five travel guides I consulted. It was not mentioned by any friend. I found it via the Internet, so our reservation was made with a stream of bits and a leap of faith.