Mar
29

Scotland Day 2: St. Patrick’s Day

By sleepyeve // Life, Random // No Comments

I’m a bit backlogged, but here’s a recap of day 2 of our Scotland trip.

After a long and eventful day one of traveling and sight seeing (I missed mentioning the crazy Yew tree we went to see before heading to the Forestry Commission yesterday – see pic at the bottom of this blog post), Christian and I decided to sleep in for 12 hours before starting day two. His sister Stefania lives in 2 bedroom flat with her roommate Catherine, but they also have a box room (not allowed to call it a bedroom because it doesn’t have a window – true story). Stefania placed a blow-up king sized air bed in there and it turned into a great guest room, so we took full advantage and slept as much as we could. Once we finally did get up, we had some Weetabix cereal. This is something I have not seen in the U.S. and I wish we had it because it was really tasty and healthy. We had the Weetabix Mini Chocolate Crisps. Mmmm… Mr. Weetabix, please export your Minibix Chocolate Mini Crisps straight to California, thanks.

After breakfast, we all packed up Keith’s car with our duffels, Keith’s bag of technology (consists of Wii, controllers, and media box filled with tons of shows and movies) and enough food to prepare meals for our 4-day (3 days, really) cabin stay. We headed up through the little town of Callander to our cabin in Strathyre (on the edge of Strathyre, I imagine… the place was somewhere between Callander and Strathyre). We checked in at the main office and drove over to our cabin – cabin #25. It was beautiful. There was a bedroom and bathroom downstairs as well as upstairs. We claimed the downstairs one that had two twin beds separated in the room, so we tried to push them together to make a nice king-sized one. The kitchen was stocked with silverware, glassware, cookware, and a little fridge. The balcony was very large – enough room for two round tables and 4 chairs at each table (they were out there, but we didn’t use them). We had a great view of Loch (lake) Lubnaig. We were yards away from the loch; it was awesome. The weather was beautiful and the water was incredibly still. The Loch was like a large, long mirror that reflected the mountains on the other side of us and the bright blue sky above us. It felt pretty unreal to be out there in the middle of so much natural beauty.

Our cabin – #25

The inside of the cabin

Loch Lubnaig

We decided to sign up for a night hike later that evening, so we headed to Callander to shop for some flashlights (they call them torches). We parked by Callander Meadows and took in the sights and then walked into a few shops and looked around. Once we found our torches and hit a few other little stores, we headed back towards the cabins. We stopped along the way to visit Hamish the Highland cow. Hamish was huge.

The night hike was a light to moderate hike with a few slight inclines and two painful sets of stone steps. Our guide was one of the park rangers (Ranger Will) and was uber-knowledgeable about the surrounding plants and animals. He taught us about the Pine Marten, which is a ferret-like animal that eats grey squirrels (remember the Pine Marten for next few blogs). He pulled a few sprigs of pine and put them in a thermos of hot water to brew us some pine needle tea. Apparently, you can brew tea out of almost any thing out in that forest. He also told us about these red mushrooms with white spots (you may remember them from Super Mario) called the Fly Agaric which I found to be super-interesting. These mushrooms are highly poisonous and psychoactive. According to Will, the Santa Claus with flying reindeer story stems from hallucinations as a result of accidental consumption of this fungus. Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer is also tied to these fungi because deer can safely consume the Fly Agaric and they actually turn their noses red after consumption. The deer that consume these mushrooms filtered out the poisons but their pee still contained the hallucinogenic chemicals, so people would take advantage of this during the winter and eat yellow snow to get their highs. Weird, kinda gross, but neat, right? The overall hike was about 3 miles. Towards the end of the hike, we hooted and listened for owls, had sonar sensors to listen for bats, (zippo results for both), and played a bit with our night vision. Once the hike was over, we all headed back to the main office and tried out some of that pine needle tea that Will made earlier in the hike. It smelled really nice, tasted a little weird, but totally worth trying. We walked away with a bucket of peanuts to bring back to our cabin to see if we could lure a Pine Marten over to our cabin.

Once we got back to our cabin, we put some peanuts out on one of the plastic tables on our balcony and then had dinner. We had salmon with garlic & onion, roasted mixed veggies, and Cadbury eggs that we picked up from the store earlier that day. We also pigged out on Winegums. These are gummy, fruit-flavored candies that are a cross between Swedish Fish and Jujy Fruits, I think. They’re really good and I wish we had them here in the U.S.

Peanuts on the table for the Pine Marten

After dinner, we relaxed on the couches and watched “Superbad” and an episode of “Supernatural.” I crocheted while watching these and managed to finish the cupcake scarf that I started working on just before we left.

And that, my friends, was the end of day 2 (you see why I’ve taken so long to blog about the trip???)

Pics from Day 1:

Ginormous Yew Tree