Scotland – Part II

Sunday, April 8th

I woke up and ate another kick ass breakfast before heading out again. This time, I had a new objective: Stirling. I was actually torn between two destinations, the Rosslyn Chapel (made famous in The DaVinci Code) and Stirling. As much as I would like to have seen Rosslyn, I couldn’t justify spending a whole day in one chapel when I could spend the day in a city with an ass-load of history. It’s been said of the city that whoever controls it, controls the whole of Scotland – so great it its strategic value.

Having made my final decision, I made my way over to the Waverly train station to make sure I could go and get back at a reasonable time and, when I found out that I could, I bought a ticket and waited for my train. I browsed the shop in the train station for some suitable reading material and came to the conclusion that there must be a ton of perverts in Scotland. Everywhere you go, there are indescribable amounts of pornographic magazines. I’m not talking about Playboys either, I’m talking about full-penetration anal and stuff like that. Not that I’m judging or anything. I’m just saying…

I ended up settling for a kick-ass guitar mag though. The cover featured Stevie Ray Vaughan and it also had articles on Nuno Bettencourt, Mike Einziger (Incubus) and the dudes from Mastodon. If that weren’t enough, they had an awesome tech section and gear review section. Everything about this particular magazine was aces.

My train finally arrived and I settled in and started reading to kill the time on my one-hour journey. It went by super quickly and I alighted (that’s British English for “got off”) in Stirling fresh and ready to go. I walked down what I assumed was the main drag only to see a bunch of ragamuffin kids and not much else. I went in the other direction, guided by my trusty train station map and decided to make my way to the castle.

I bought my admission ticket and spent some time in the gift shop looking for anything that wasn’t tacky but came away disappointed. I made my way into the castle and, since it was Easter Sunday, there were all kinds of activities gears around rats, err... children, and they were running all over the damn place. It was still a really cool visit though. As in Edinburgh, the castle is built upon a crag and there are good views of the city and it is a highly defensible position.

After the castle I wandered around the town to see what else was going on. I stopped by Argyll’s lodgings (an old villa that’s been more or less preserved as a museum) and then walked around the Church of the Holy Rude and its graveyard. I don’t know if this’ll sound morbid or not, but Scotland has the coolest graveyards ever.

I stumbled about the rest of the city before deciding it was time to make my way over to the Wallace Monument. It’s on a hill a few miles outside of the city and it is visible from nearly any point in Stirling. I read in my guidebook that William Wallace’s sword is on display there and that the view from the top includes seven different battlegrounds which seemed bad-ass enough. I started walking in the general direction before coming to the conclusion that it was fucking far away and I tried to find a bus. Unfortunately, the bus stops in Stirling don’t have any stops or destination information posted on them so you pretty much have to be a local to know which bus goes where. I went into a convenience shop to ask which bus to take and they told me that there wasn’t one that went directly to the monument and since it was Sunday service, I’d probably have to wait ages for the bus anyway. They did, however, point out that the monument was only a 15 minute walk and pointed out the way. I was comforted by this and set off by foot.

15 minutes my mother-fucking ass…

I walked for AGES and the only thing that kept me going was my iron will not to be defeated by this monument. I carried forward and made it to the base of the hill. I climbed up the hill to the admission gate (inexplicably lower than the monument itself) and arrived just in time to watch the last bus take a load of people up to the front steps of the monument. So, I had to walk all the way up the damn mountain now and arrived with little time to spare. Now all I had to do was climb up another 60+ meters (probably 15 floors or so) on a narrow pain in the ass stairway dodging the people that had gone up and were now coming back down.

Let me say this: screw the Wallace Monument. The building looked cool enough but there really wasn’t anything in there except Wallace’s sword (which was ginormous). The views were cool but if you’re ever in Stirling and thinking about making the trip on foot, skip it. I have pictures; I’ll show them to you and save you the trouble. I will say that the views were pretty nice though. The town of Stirling was most prominent but the battlegrounds for the Battle of Stirling Bridge and the Battle of Bannockburn were pointed out on plaques so you could triangulate their approximate locations. I made my way back down and took the requisite pictures of William Wallace’s sword, which was, legitimately, as tall as Danny. You may think that isn’t SO big because Danny’s a runt but actually think about carrying a sword that size for a moment. Wallace was freakin’ strong.

After the monument, I had no choice but to walk back to the city but it did afford me the opportunity to visit Stirling Bridge where William Wallace led the Scots to one of their major victories over the English.

I started to notice a nauseating smell but disregarded it until my curiosity got the best of me. Naturally, I was the source of the smell. You see, it was cold and windy that day, so I wore a sweater with a jacket on top of that. However, all the walking (seriously, I covered a ridiculous amount of territory that day) had caused me to perspire without my really noticing it. The jacket incubated the sweat which created a seriously disturbing odor and it was while I was all funkified that the one cute girl in all of Scotland decided to sit next to me at the train station as I was waiting for the train back to Edinburgh. Awesome.

I rode back to Edinburgh but climbed out for a quick stop in the small town of Linlithgow. It’s where Mary Queen of Scots was born and there is an old palace in ruins there that I thought I’d check out. I walked around there for a little bit and took some cool photos before dragging my exhausted and smelly ass back to the train station.

Upon arriving back in Scotland, I visited the last few things on my list before settling in at the pub close to my hotel again. I ate a tasty burger and had a few beers, chatting with the bartender whom I barely understood before heading back to the hotel and passing out dead.

Monday, April 9th

I woke up, ate and then went to the airport to fly back to Munich.