Hogmanay

In Scotland. New years' eve is a big celebration and we call it Hogmanay. From wikipedia:

Hogmanay (pronounced [ˌhɔgmə'ne:] — with the main stress on the last syllable - hog-muh-NAY) is the Scots word for the last day of the year and is synonymous with the celebration of the New Year in the Scottish manner. Its official date is the 31 December. However this is normally only the start of a celebration which lasts through the night until the morning of the 1 January or, in many cases, 2 January.

The roots of Hogmanay reach back to the pagan celebration of the winter solstice. In Europe, this evolved into the ancient celebration of Saturnalia, a great Roman winter festival, where people celebrated completely free of restraint and inhibition. The Vikings celebrated Yule, which later became the Twelve Days of Christmas, or the "Daft Days" as they were sometimes called in Scotland. The winter festival went underground with the Protestant Reformation and ensuing years, but re-emerged near the end of the 17th century.

The Cadet is going to Edinburgh with her family, so Mowgli and I put our kilts in our rucks sacks, fill the boot of the beetle with alcohol and head up to Glasgow.There is little or no plan, but basically, we will sniff out some parties with the assistance of Nine Inch Nina, my brother, and anyone else who gets in our way in the next 12 hours or so.

We have gone overboard on the alcohol, having decided that we are not going to run out. The boot of the care contains:

Red wine - six bottles:

White wine - 2 bottles:

Jack daniels - 2 bottles:

Spiced rum - 1 bottle:


Were we to drink this in the next 12 hours, even though we are wearing kilts, which surely increases your tolerance to alcohol, we would definitely die. The amount of alcohol exists in the boot of the car in order that it can act as our own personal stash which we can come back to if we run out of alcohol. Our first port of call is a drink with my brother in the Halt Bar on Woodlands road:


He isn't there and a phone call tells us that he is next door at the Arlington:

He lives near here, so is a main stay at most of the local bars. I know the mates that he's with, so we settle into the beers quite easily. It turns out that they have Budvar on tap:



Mowgli has been mourning Czech beer since he got back to scotland, so we take a few pints of it. It doesn't taste as good as it does in Prague, but it is still far better than Tennants.

After we've discussed plans for the night and had a few more drinks, Mowgli and I head to Nine Inch Nina's. She's nto answering her phone but she told us to come round, so we head over there to see what's happening. We check the boot of the car and take a bottle of wine for her house party. We have a taste for beer now, so we leave the rest and head to an off license for some cold beers. Having started on the Czech beers we get 6 bottle of Staropramen each:


We get a Taxi to the other side of Kelvingrove park only to discover that ИiN is AWOL. The Staropramen comes in handy as we walk back to the Halt Bar, while trying to get either Nine Inch Nina Ms. Diddley on the phone to find out what is happening.
We get back to the Halt and settle into more pints of Budvar, until Mowgli's kilted friend arrives, at which point we head into town to meet the recently contacted Nina at Miso the Japanese sushi bar:


It's a 15 minute walk into the centre, and we have returned to the car to pick up the last three bottles of Staropramen for the road:


By the time we get to Miso, we're not on the guest list, so have to wait outside until Nina arrives to network us in the door.
We sit on the wall finishing our beers until Nina arrives and gives us a big bear hug... Then it's into miso where we feel slightly out of place. It's a classy place, and a little far removed from the Arlington....
Nina and I always drink Jack Daniels together, and tonight is no exception:


Nina's art work hangs on all the walls of Miso, and I get the drunken Hogmanay tour. I have one bad photo taken in the club:



The bar closes and we do the New Year count down followed by the ubiquitous hugging and well wishing of people you have either just met or don;t know at all. During auld lang syne we did the can can to an array of flashing cameras. It maybe have been the kilts, or maybe the Offenbach appreciation society had chosen to spend their hogmanay in Miso. We are keen to go off and start on the first footing parties. Wikipedia defines first footing as:

First-Foot, in British folklore, especially that of the north and Scotland, the first person who crosses the threshold on Christmas or New Year's Eve. Good or ill luck is believed to be brought the house by First-Foot, and a female First-Foot is regarded with dread. In Lancashire a light-haired man is as unlucky as a woman, and it became a custom for dark-haired males to hire themselves out to take the New Year in. In Worcestershire luck is ensured by stopping the first carol-singer who appears and leading him through the house. In Yorkshire it must always be a male who enters the house first, but his fairness is no objection. In Scotland first-footing was always more elaborate than in England, involving a subsequent entertainment.

We have a couple of glasses of champagne and then leave:

The walk towards the west is fun. Everyone has now been drinking, spirits are high and there is a general agreement in the streets of Scotland at this time of year that you wish everyone happy new year and say hello and have random conversations. It's great, and it's very glasgow.....

We manage to have 1 hour conversation in a newspaper shop when we go in for a diet coke and a packet of crisps. By the time we get back to the Halt bar to track down my brother, its about 2.30 - its taken us the best part of 2 hours to walk 2 miles. The phone networks are down and my bro is nowhere to be seen, but eventually after many more drunken conversations and invites to parties in places which too obscure and far away. Eventually my brother appears to tell us that he's found an open window which leads to a party we can gate crash. We get a bottle of bourbon from the car each and head along....

It turns out that the party is extremely boring.... pretty inconsiderate of them to leave a window open when the party isn't up to much....

We head along great western road to byres road, where we are pretty sure there has to be some parties. We head into one party where my brother knows some people. Its a standard student party, and isn't up to much, but we stay for a little while and drink a few more JD and cokes. It's been a while since I was at a student party, so the general attitude and arrogance which everyone seems to emit gets on my nerves somewhat. The party is not interesting enough for Mowgli and I's European pallettes, or more to the point out fantasy of what Glasgow should look like on Hogmanay.
This is the major problem of Hogmanay. Everyone expects this wonderfully wild party to happen so people are disappointed. We are quite happy, but it certainly hasn't been the wild times we expected. Sometimes you feel liek you have to force the good party, just because you are trying to top 19?? when it was so wild that you don't expect it to be anything else, but we tend to look to the past with rosey tinted specs. We are now on our way out to downanhill where there is the promise of a subdued, but still awake party.

We have decided that we aren't going to be in Scotland for next year's Hogmanay. It's too good an opportunity to discover the pulse of another city, and it appears we've ran too far to get home.

We wander through the big houses and winding streets of Hyndland and Dowanhill until we get to the house in question, checking along the way for suitable parties. It appears that everyone has retured early - although it is about 6am.
When we arrive, it is indeed a quiet party, but it's some friendly people and low and behold, there's a guitar:


Okay..... It's a robust beast with pretty high action which makes my drunken fingers ache, but it is a guitar. Between swigs of Kentucky's finest we blast out a few Lemonheads, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Neil Young covers, before settling on a 12 bar blues. We manage to do what by memory was a 45 minute blues jam with Mowgli improvising lyrics based on what we'd got up to in the previous year(alright most of them were based on the previous week, but you get the picture); which is quite a good way to end a year. Maybe it was our drunken ears, but it sounded amazing - improvised solos, improvised lyrics etc. etc.

The drinking and playing continues until about 8am, until we find ourselves wandering aimlessly along Great Western Road trying to hail a taxi, a half empty bottle of Jack daniels each. We contemplate various possibilites at finding a party - another scout along Byres Road??, Murano street student halls?? but eventually since the sun is coming up, we decide to head back to the flat and go to bed.

After visiting the bank, arranging a mortgage and managing to pay the extraordinarily inflated rate for the taxi we make it back home. We are about to go to bed, but can hear a party somewhere, after sniffing around for a while we discover that its coming from the fan in the Kitchen:



We can hear a party through the pipes. It's about 9am. We are in a dodgy area of Glasgow and we after listening for 10 minutes, we decide that we can't hear enough women or Seattle Grunge to merit dirtying our kilts by doing a Bruce Willis through the heating system......

And so with that note the year is over.......

Road trip day 2

....we wake up very early, when everyone else is eagerly getting up to see if there's snow for snowboarding. I'm quite glad, cos it forces everybody to be up and we need to be cleared out of the Youth Hostel by 9.30am.

It appears that the grumpy old guy slept in his car. Stupid bastard.... If he's stayed in bed for 10 minutes longer he would be asleep like the rest of us, instead of sleeping in a cold car all night. Stubborn eikel...

Anyway.... While the Cadet disappears for what seems like an hour, I start taking stuff out to the car.... I'm greeted with vistas that couldn't have been imagined in the dark the night before.







The car has also developed a tattoo:




We've decided to head up to inverness and then back down Loch Ness and home, but first, we are going to go closer to the cairngorms.

The Cairngorms is a region of mountains which form the highest plateau in the British isles. The plateau is the home to 4 of the 5 highest mountains in Scotland - the other being Ben Nevis. There's 17 munros here all together.

We drive up a single path road and the excitement wells up. We're getting higher and higher, and I'm thinking about heading up the cable car to the top.
When we get out the car, its absolutely freezing. This coupled with the 8.50 charge is enough to convince us that going to the top for a few photos would be a bit daft. Instead we head into the visitor centre for some breakfast. We are up so early that the kitchen isn't open yet... The youth Hostel would be a good option to make sure we are on the mountain early if we come back for some climbing. We take some photos for a while:






We eventually get a bacon roll and a cup of coffee in front of the log fire..... All the walking books and equipment in the visitor centre make me want to at least go higher by cable, but once we are outside with -10 blasting off our faces, the fantasy disappears.

So back in the car it is to the while the car speakers are vibrating to the sounds of "Coming down the mountain!!!!!" - The Mountain Song by Jane's Addiction:



Once we were back down to ground level, we returned to the scene of our aborted campfire. The ice is still frozen over and the views are lovely:









Before long , we are well on our road to Inverness. We see a sign for culloden, and decide to go an pay our respects. I was here, in the Summer during our road trip to Skye, but since we're passing anywayy, we take a quick trip in and show The Cadet some of our history:






It's a lot quieter than it was in tourist season, which just adds to the eeriness.

We head to the centre of Inverness, we're not really sure why, but we're very sure about leaving once we get stuck in traffic. After about an hour of bad navigation decisions and wrong turns, we are on the road to Loch Ness. It's good to get out of civilisation again. Normally the tourist laden road down Loch Ness wouldn't count as out of civilisation, but it's close to Christmas so it isn't bad. We're not long onto the road when we just have to stop. The scenery looks like a picture postcard, so we get out:









It is absolutely stunning. Really silent and calm. There's a mist rolling along the top of the loch which adds to the mystery and serenity of this place. We can see the edge of the loch, and with about 30 cm from the bank, you can see nothing in the water. It is dark, still and you can't see the top because of this rolling mist. No wonder we have legends of the Monster.

I decide to have a pee in the bushes. This is disturbed when a police car slowly drive past and I have to hold and hide for a little while until they pass. I nearly got arrested!!!!

We continue down Loch Ness knowing that nothing will match what we've just seen. We stop in Drumnadrochit to stock up on Irn Bru....



...after this, it's a stop at Urquart Castle for the inevitable postacrd photos of Loch Ness:





We're now close enough to home that the scenery isn't interesting any more. We've overloaded on Scottishness. This is always the toughest part of a road trip. We need to get Mowgli home by 6pm for a dentist appointment, so we are now on a tighter schedule.

We contemplate heading to Appin and Stalker castle to visit my grandmother, but decide that it would put us behind schedule. It's a good job, cos it turns out she was in glasgow at the time. It's also a good job, cos once we are through Glencoe again, we get stuck behind a stream of cars traveling at about 40 mph. This always seems to happen on my way back from road trips. It's when everyone has spent lots of time together and the conversation is waning. You;re left driving along at a boring speed, with no one talking.

By the time we are approaching Glasgow, we have learned that Mowgli's brother's leg is more serious than fist suspected and he's getting emergency surgery. We call in at the Southern general to drop off Mowgli and then we head back down to Ayrshire, or I try to.

My brain seems to be awake enough to drive, but too tired to navigate, it takes me about 45 minutes of wrong exits at roundabouts and wrong exits on motorways to finally take the road to Kilmarnock, but soon we are heading off down the road with Dookie keeping me awake:



About 10 miles from home, it starts to snow heavily. The Cadet is learning to drive and asks how much of problem snow is. I tell her its more a problem of dazzling you and making you think you are in the millenium falcon if you have your face to close to it:



For the next 2 miles or so, we drive along with our noses on the windscreen singing the Darth Vader theme:

Dum Dum Dumde Dum Dumde Dum. Dee dum dum dumde dum dumde dum. DUM DUm DE DUM De DUMDE DUm DUME Dee dum de dumdeded dum de dumde dee deumde dee

Its good fun, and I think shows that we have fallen off the edge of sanity.

We make it home and vegetate in front of the telly until Mowgli is finished with the Dentist. We then head for an early night after our adventures........

We hit the road....

We wake up early - or as early is possible.

My Brother has to be at the Doctors, so we are going to run him over there before we set off. So that we can save some time and get underway, we merge breakfast with this, so there's four scaffy, half sleeping bodies driving along eating porridge and drinking Irn Bru:





For those tempted to try and eat porridge while driving, you should be aware that it can seriously impair your enjoyment of salty Carbs, and piss of your brother who has to hold it when you aren't at traffic lights.

Anyway......

By just before 11am, we're finally heading up the west coast of Scotland via my brother's flat to drop him off. Given our discussions yesterday, our soundtrack at the moment is the Lemonheads:



It's great fun carefree music, and is perfect for the camaraderie and good feeling that we drive through Scotland with. I really enjoy the drive... For some reason I hate driving in Europe, it stresses me out. I'm not good enough at driving on the right to enjoy it and relax into it, but Scotland is much different, I know the roads and the side of the road, so I can relax and drive for pleasure. Before long we make the obligatory stop at Inveruglas, for Irn Bru, bacon rolls and photos:







Inveruglas is the perfect stop before the worst part of the trip. After this it gets twisty and the cars go very slow. If you;re gonna get travel sick you'll get travel sick, on the top end of Loch Lommond, but we get through it quite easily by listening to the endless stream of iTunes dished out by DJ Mowgli, and also knowing how great the scenery gets further up.

By the time we are turning left at Crianlarich, I'm pretty excited. You can turn right and stay in relative flatness - thats the stuff of Day trips, but we are going left - to the highlands.

We make good time, and don't stop at Tyndrum, so our first stop is on the Rannoch Moor:







The Rannoch moor looks lovely. It's one of the places that looks different every time. All the water is iced over and covered with snow this time.

It always amazes me how long all the tour buses will spend sitting at one layby, only to discover that the next layby has a far better view. We prefer guerilla touristry where you stop in every layby for 5 minutes, thus avoiding getting stuck behind that caravan that took so long to overtake, and getting the scenery from every angle.

Once we're entering Glencoe, we're on a high at seeing all the beautiful scenery. I love this place - I've said it before, but no matter how many times you go, you can't beat driving through the mountains:









We have decided that we are on our way to Fort William. It pulls us over towards some more interesting scenery, and it's a long time since Mowgli or I have been, and I don't think the Cadet has been at all.

Once we pop out at Ballachulish, it's about 20 miles along Loch Lhinnie to get to Fort William. I always feel this road's uninteresting after Glencoe, and it's always packed. I'm very glad to get out from behind the wheel when we arrive in Fort William. Not just because I've been driving for ages, but also because the scenery looks like this:





We have a good wander about Fort William. There's not a lot too see, but it's good to get out and discover somewhere that I've not seen 1000 times before. Fort William is the starting point for climbing Ben Nevis. I always think it's disappointing that you can't see some marvelous snowy peak towering over the town.

Once we are fed and watered, and we've stretched our legs, we get back in the car. More decision's have been made. Despite the fact that we are very close to the road up to Skye, we instead head over towards aviemore and and the Cairngorms on some back road. We have the lonely planet walking in Scotland book:



Not because we are planning on doing any munro's, but because it's great fro telling you where cheap accommodation is for scaffy travellers and backpackers.

It's getting dark now.... I'm getting tired, and the road seems to have given up on sign posts. The only thing thats keeping me going is looking forward to a drink once we settle gown. We've managed to book a room at Cairngorm Lodge on Loch Morlich, and we're driving through the darkness of a windy road until we get there. When I get out for a pee, I notice that even in the Dark the landscape is amazing:





To keep morale up during the trip, we explained to The Cadet what the sleeping arrangements were in a Scottish Youth Hostel. Usual thing - women's dorm's and men's dorms. She's not convinced. "I have to sleep with strangers!!!"

We joke that there will be butch German hill walking Lesbians in her dorm, and it's a running joke for about ten miles.

We finally arrive at Aviemore.

Aviemore is Scotland's premier ski resort, so it's a wee bit full of tourists, but I'm just glad to see some civilisation. We are pretty early for the hostel, so we stock up on some supplies in Tesco. We are planning to head to the loch side and have a camp fire later - we even brought an acoustic guitar for the occasion. I am surveying the red wine possibilities in Tesco when I am informed by The Cadet that since its -10 outside, we need something stronger. We stand perusing the stronger section with some other russians(no stereotypes there then), until we settle on Captain Morgan's rum:



I'm not entirely convinced, so I pick up a couple of bottles of Shiraz as well.

When we get to the hostel, we have to wait in a queue while other people check in the first language we hear is from a rather tall German woman - I point this out to The Cadet and we have a good laugh....

We head off to our respective rooms and dump our stuff. There's two snowboarders from Glasgow in our room with us. They seem like a good laugh.

After freshening up, we head into Aviemore for fish and chips



It costs far too much, and the edge is taken off the experience by the fact that the "little chippie" has an automatic door. This plaice(geddit!!!) has too much money, and it's fish and chips suffer for it.

With our fish and chips and our alcohol, we head to the banks of Loch Morlich to have a camp fire and a sing song. The romantic idea of this dies away pretty quickly. Although the stars are lighting up the sky and the loch is beautiful and frozen.... it is freeeeeeeeeezing and there isn't much wood around for fires. I need to make a mental note to keep fire wood in the back of the car for occasions like this during road trips.

We burn what scrap wood we can find along with a daily record and some suitable rubbish that was kicking about in the back of the car. The Cadet shows us how to down rum - something to do with breathing all the air out of your lungs first.

We play a few songs on the Guitar since we brought it, kick the fire onto the frozen loch and then head off to the warm comfort of the Youth Hostel.

My one recommendation for anybody planning on staying in a Youth Hostel is to bring your own entertainment. Youth Hostels appear to attract some very boring people.

We watch The Doors movie on Mowgli's laptop until some other people come into our room. They are 40 something serious walker types, so we decide to head off somewhere else and play cards. Having seen up to the Desert scene in the doors movie, and given that The Cadet is prone to being in a daze, "Ride the snake" becomes the statement of the road trip:



We head off to a quieter room and take a pack of cards with us. The youth Hostel is dead, so we are basically whiling away time until 11.30pm when we are meant to be in bed.

After a couple of games of pool, we head off to bed.

At about 11:45pm, the Glaswegian boys come into our room with a few others and ask if we want to go outside for some drinks. While we are humming and hawing over the plus point of Jack daniels versus the minus point, or ten minus points, of the cold. One of the afore mentioned serious hillwalkers gets out of bed, picks up his bag and storms out in the huff. The drunkards laugh and we say good nigth to them and wish them on their way.......

...riding the snake....

and drifting into sleep......

.....