CALLANDER, Tuesday, July 22, 2009, 4 p.m. – Our dear friend and Glasgow native Rehan Ahmad told us we hadn’t experienced a true Scottish summer until we had “rain up our noses and were soaked to the underwear.” 

Well, Rehan, I’m happy to say we now have the authentic experience.

Today, we left our lovely little hotel in the south of Skye (after another massive Scottish breakfast, of course, see above/below) to drive to the ferry in Armadale, a 20-minute drive away.

There we boarded a small ferry for the half-hour trip over the Sound of Sleat to Mallaig, the terminus of the Harry Potter Express we’d ridden on a few days ago and where we’d had a great seafood chowder. This time, we followed the railroad route on a fairly good road back over the waterfall-streaked hills into Fort William.

From there, we drove east into the spectacular scenery of Glencoe, best known for an infamous 1692 slaughter by the army of the Clan MacDougal engineered by a treacherous government official bent on destroying the Highland clan.

Soldiers murdered at least 38 people who had been hosting the soldiers during a snowstorm. Others were driven out into the snowstorm and perished there. The massacre, which made it into a pamphlet complete with the government’s complicity, gained sympathy among the public for the Highlanders and the Jacobite cause.

We ate a picnic lunch in the café at the Visitor’s Center there (the rain was falling too hard outside), but we were able to see the massive mountains before they started to disappear in the midst.

I’ve never seen anything quite like them, but they evoked the same feeling of awe that you get in the Yosemite Valley when you look up at the impossibly steep mountains. We learned of an interesting American connection with the massacre: a 12-year-old son of the MacDougal’s who survived the massacre had a direct descendent who emigrated to the United States in the 19^th century, I believe. His son then married a Nez Perce woman, and after the massacre at Big Hole in Montana, always spoke of the two massacres as very similar. Sorry I don’t have better details, but  you know how it is to go through a museum with a 7-year-old.

We then drove up over the mountains of Glencoe, which were impossibly gorgeous, with lacy waterfalls, misted hanging valleys, and the wide U-shape of a glaciated valley.

It really was breathtaking and would be a fabulous place to go hiking. There were actually quite a few people in rain ponchos slogging along the hillsides. Brave souls.

We then leveled out on the wide open spaces of the Rannoch Moor, which was dotted with huge rocks I believe were left behind after the glaciers melted. Then the rain really began to get interesting. We had been warned coming out of Fort William by huge flashing signs reading “Heavy rains ahead. Watch for flooding roads.” Well, for the next hour or so we would be hit by rainstorm after rainstorm, dumping so much rain that the roads indeed had standing water and the windshield wipers couldn’t clear the rain fast enough. One minute it would be sprinkling, the next you’d have to slam on your brakes to keep from hydroplaning into the oncoming tour buses. We couldn’t get here fast enough.

We did pass through some lovely hills, however, places that would be fun to return to – like a tiny town called (mother wrote it down) with a sweet-looking hotel, and a bike path built on a reclaimed railroad line outside Callander, where we are right now. We saw people riding over a stone viaduct that looked like the one in the Harry Potter movie.

Definitely a place to come back to. Now off for a walk and dinner with the folks!