May 14 & 15: Recreating childhood photos, the Pilgrimage to Beith & the first day in Glasgow
Waking stiff and not quite used to the car after 6 nights of double bed luxury, we quickly shed our sleeping bags and decided to find some coffee by Loch Lomond. For a tourist destination so close to Glasgow, you’d think these towns would provide necessary caffeine earlier than 10am. You’d also be wrong.
We sat in the car, listening to Scottish radio talk Scottish politics (we might need to get the down low if we’re going to maybe probably move to this glorious nation) until we stumbled upon a place that was open, did Veggie Breakfast and had wifi. Win-win-win. They also had amazing napkins, but that’s probably irrelevant.
Nicholas paid an overdue call to his parents and got a snap of him as a wee one at a little coarse-sanded beach called Duck Bay, not far from where we were eating. We decided to swing by and recreate aforementioned photo. Nicholas claimed it was for his parents’ sake, but he had a huge, goofy grin on his face.
Loch Lomond
Nicholas at Duck Bay, recreating his childhood
From here, we made a stopover at Balmaha,
which was beautiful and there were lots of ducks around and lots of tourists
were taking pictures of them. Ducks
haven’t got anything on puffins though, which are officially the coolest
water-dwelling bird. There was also a
statue of a bloke named John Muir, who was an environmentalist/naturalist/hiker/author/philosopher/engineer/botanist/geologist
(I couldn’t make that many slashes up) who was famous for wearing a red
beanie. They had a day in honour of him
at Balmaha and you could buy a red beanie if you didn’t already have one. He looked a pretty cool and smart chap. His statue featured him wearing a tie and
Nicholas and I wondered if he wore a tie while hiking, which would make him
also a very dapper chap. Nicholas should
step up his hiking attire game.
We've developed a real love for these witches hat roofs (seen at Balmaha)
Balmaha
John Muir
We still had another stop to make before we
got to Glasgow, so we head on from Balmaha to Beith. We were making the pilgrimage to Beith to
explore the small town where my grandfather’s family was from. After making several wrong turns on our way
there (I hadn’t missed the swirling six-lane roundabouts you find as you near a
big city) we did a quick loop around the town and stopped near the community
hall to park.
Nicholas made a beeline for the first
bakery he came across and singled out the most sugary, perfect-looking dessert
he could. Munching away on a cake
covered in cream and icing, Nicholas followed me through the main street and
past several pretty houses with gardens full of tulips. After much wandering through the town, we
popped into the community center, asking a man in an all-over like plumbers
wear if there was a book store nearby.
“A book stall?” he asked.
“Yeah, a book store. Is there one around?” Nick clarified.
“A stall? Maybe down the road, but I dunno
about a stall.”
I piped up.
“So there are no book shops?”
“Oh, a shop. I don’t know about a shop.” He walked back into the main hall of the
community center and we decided to try the library.
Lots of children were pouring out onto the
streets now, as it had hit 3pm, so we navigated past them back to the main
street.
“Is there anywhere that sells books
nearby?” I asked, after all the hellos and how are yous and formalities were
exchanged.
An elderly lady pursed her lips and looked
doubtful. “Perhaps,” she said, “but I’ll
have to ask –Gertrude or Beatrice or Judy or something quite dated – because
she’s the local.” She gestured to a lady
beside her who was currently scanning a collection of Dan Brown books for a
middle-aged man.
Popping up from behind the counter, another
gent pointed to a small trolley on our right.
“There are a few books on there,” he offered, and Nicholas was already
rifling through them. We were hoping to
find a book, a pamphlet, anything to do with the town of Beith, so we could
send it home.
“What kind of books are you after, dear?”
asked Gertrude or Beatrice or Judy.
“Hopefully something about the area,” I
replied.
She opened a metal archiving cupboard to
show me a collection of books and pulled one out at random. OLD BEITH it said on the front.
“Yes.
Yes, exactly that. I’ll take
that.”
The Parish Church at Beith
Nicholas' cream cake
She asked us if we were looking into local
history and we explained that we were after some information on Beith to send
home, because I had family connections to the area. She led me into a small room with computers
and an old wooden writing desk, locked shut.
She produced a long metal key and gave the writing desk a good shove,
lifting the lid and showing us to a collection of archives, photograph albums
and a book called Tracing your Scottish
and British ancestry.
Not entirely sure what we were looking for,
we flipped through some births and deaths, scanning for details, but giving up
and choosing to leaf through old pictures instead. We paid for our books and head off, because
we had very, very limited time on the clock before our hire car was due to be
returned. It was a mad dash to head to
our Airbnb, run all of our things upstairs (and I really do mean ALL of our
things) and hurry to the car rental place to give them back the Corsa we now
knew as home. Goodbye, fair car.
So we’d accumulated a lot of stuff on our
little jaunt with the car, because we could keep loading and loading her
up. I’m not entirely sure how we did it,
because all we’d been buying were maps and camping gear. A lot of camping gear. Also a lot of food. And a lot of Loch Ness Monster
memorabilia.
We mulled over our options – to buy extra
luggage or not to buy extra luggage? – and came to the conclusion in the wee
hours of the morning that we’d be more mobile in Norway if we invested in hiking
packs. Forget the fact that numerous
people had offered us their hiking packs before we left. Forget that we said “nah, don’t worry about
it! We’ll have a car”. Forget our
ignorance. We were up even longer
weighing up pros and cons of bags and where we’d send our accumulated gear.
Leafing through the archives at the Beith Library
A chair that used to belong to the Parish Church, and now lived at the library
The town of Beith
The next morning, we still had hiking packs
on the brain and we’d hardly slept or ate because all we’d been thinking about
were hiking packs, so we head to Tiso.
Nicholas has a nifty Osprey pack with a trampoline back, which makes for
cooled-down comfort when hiking in hot weather.
He’s a bit obsessed with it, so when we found some 65L packs with the
same back system, that’s what we opted for. You can check out the amazing pack here.
The girl at the Tiso outdoor experience
center was brilliant (and judging by her gnarled hands, she was probably a
climber) and fit our matching backpacks and told us how comfortable they
were. She wasn’t wrong, either. We marched around with them on, then I
looked for new hiking pants (I ripped the bum on mine when I slipped down a
rock at the Buachaille) but had no luck, we messed around with VAT return
forms, and then head back to our apartment.
We stopped at the Co-Op to get some bread and Nicholas bought something
called an Ice Cream Taco, which is exactly what it sounds like.
This was all pretty mundane, and not really
how you expect to spend your first day in the city famous for its burgeoning
art scene. Things took a turn for the
cool and interesting when we got back to the apartment, though.
So, in my relaying of our exciting, strange
last-minute adventures on Hoy, I probably forgot to mention one small,
seemingly insignificant detail about one small, seemingly insignificant object
we found at the Bothy. It was the size
of a fist, shaped like a submarine, the colour of concrete and had two metal
wires sticking out of it. Nicholas had
found it on a shelf of curiosities in the Bothy, and had assumed it was
collected during the Bag The Bruck initiative before we arrived. Thinking it might be something he could crack
apart and look inside, he pocketed it.
Fast-forward two weeks to our stay in
Fasnacloich and we’re sitting down, chatting to Fedor, the man of the house,
about things washed up on Orkney. When
Fedor lived there, he enjoyed beach combing and came across a rock mold used
for metal pouring. When he took it to
the museum to find out if it was something interesting, they asked him to
donate it and he obliged. “I’d much
rather have it on my mantel,” he told us.
Anyway, Nicholas relayed the story of
finding the submarine-shaped grey object on the beach and fetched it from his
bag. He turned it over in his hands and
found the words Wildlife Computers written on the side, and a string of
numbers.
“I think it’s a tracker,” said Nick.
“I bet it’s a serial number,” I said,
taking a look. “I bet it’s off a basking
shark or something.”
Nicholas flicked the company an email, and
we didn’t think much of it. I didn’t
think they’d reply, Nicholas thought maybe the company was defunct, and after
three or four days, he started hacking into it by the fire.
Fast-forward to our first night in Glasgow,
and we’ve got brand-spanking new packs, and we’re filling them and weighing
them and deciding what to take to Norway and I’m in the loo and I come out and
Nicholas is looking on his phone with a huge goofy grin on his face. His face started to fall and he swore.
“They got back to me!” he said, once he’d
finished reading. He read me the email,
which explained that the tracker had, in fact, been attached to a basking shark,
and was a prototype attached in 2013 off Washington. It was designed to detach after 45 days
(which it must’ve) but it hadn’t washed up.
The writer of the email, whose name was Ann, asked if Nicholas was
somebody who regularly combed the beach.
She asked why his email referred to origami paper. She asked if he was a paper crafter or a
scientist. She asked if he could post
her the device so that they could retrieve the data, because it’s so hard to
track basking sharks, seeing as they surface rarely and travel huge distances
daily.
“I hope I haven’t destroyed their tracker,”
Nick said doubtfully, looking at the shattered pieces of the submarine
object. “I hope they can still get the
info from the chip.”
And that was the end of our first day in
Glasgow.
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