No Excuse Now

I'm not going to bash the cuisine of the British Isles, because nearly everything I ate on our trip was interesting and delicious, which is more than I can say for the average restaurant meal in El Paso. This is also a testament to the value of guides, who could steer us to the best establishments and also make recommendations of what --and what not to--eat.

I've always fancied myself as a fairly adventurous eater, willing to jump in front of a plate of well....anything. But it dawned on me sitting in front of a truly good plate of haggis, neeps and tatties at a Scottish pub, that I best rethink my self-image as an eater. More about that later.

First things first, the desserts are wonderful.

Banoffee pie (banana and toffee!)
Cranachan (oats, raspberries, cream)
Sticky Toffee Pudding (steamed and sticky!)
Ginger cake
Crunchy Lemon cake (crystallized lemon sugar on top)
Rhubarb crumble
Coffee walnut cake
Brandy truffle
Lemon tart!

On to scones. Our guides said, "Scones at tea--a fine example of the sum is greater than its parts." True! Layer clotted or double cream, then jam on top of a scone and you are in for an eyes-rolling-back-into-your-head extraordinary.

Potatoes. When's the last time you had a truly delicious potato, one that made you stop in mid-chew and say, "wow?" Every one I had in Scotland was flavorful all on its own, with a pleasing and tender texture. No grainy, mushy taters there!

Speaking of mush, there was an interesting (and again, surprisingly good) dish of dried and then reconstituted peas. Mushy peas, they're called. Trust me, they're good.

Root vegetables galore. Rutabagas (neeps), parsnips, carrots, taters (tatties). I love root veggies. You have to respect a country that enjoys parsnips.

And peas...really good peas, becaue they're a local food. One beautiful morning, I strolled past huge field of organic peas, a very pretty crop.

Sandwiches, now. Bacon sandwiches for breakfast! Chip sandwiches made of french fries tucked between bread. Okay, so I didn't try these, but they sound interesting, no?

Hands down the best lunch was the Ploughman's Lunch at the Scottish estate in continuous habitation for 900 years. You can see a photo of the plate above. Lovely potato salad, bit of chutney, cheese, waldorf salad, pickled items, tossed salad, apples. (Thanks, Dad, for a photo of your lunch!)

Meat. For this former vegetarian, the options for meat were a culinary dive off the high platform into very deep water. Sure, there was GREAT lamb, but also several dishes of unspeakable animal parts, usually presented in sausage form. But you knew they'd been procured from the local butcher shop on High Street, the main street for commerce and community in each town. Folks gather at the butcher's or the baker's shop to meet their neighbors. Walmart hasn't succeeded in the UK--and we know this all too well here--because they are more interested in undercutting prices than in supporting community. Hey, for that reason alone I'll try black pudding! And all of it was tasty.

So this brings me back to my initial premise: if I can eat haggis (top, first photo) and black pudding with gusto where it is a traditional food, I guess I'll have to buck up and try menudo here at home!

More of beautiful Scotland

Sublime Scotland

I have been doing some reading and thinking about landscape, trying to get a handle on the assets of the region. What is at the core of our land out here that is so in-your-soul?

An answer came during our trip in the contrast between the Scottish and English countryside. Scotland was cold and wild. You could get lost in Scotland. and survival of the elements was not a given. I liked Scotland. By contrast, England was cozy, and I never felt I could ever be fully alone. The English have made nature as accessible as it can possibly be, with a series of public footpaths crossing estates and farms open to anyone wanting a trek. England was beautiful, but it felt safe and managed.

After just a few days in each country, my knowledge is hardly encyclopedic, of course. And this "answer" seems painfully obvious and simplistic.

But this is an element in the appeal of Far West Texas, the sense that nature is big, bigger than yourself. Sublime. Noble. Majestic. Something worthy of greater awe. Scotland has seemingly endless cold mountainsides of ferns and beech, snails and hedgehog and badger. Everything green and wet. We have parched mountains of prickly pear, roadrunner, rattlesnakes and mountain lion. Neither is tame. Both demand respect.

I felt an angry restlessness for many years, feeling a need to break free and breathe, and test my wits on my own. The land here and in Scotland feel a match for challenge, where success and survival are not assured, but earned with strength and grit.

There's nothing like being in the hands of a professional

First things first; the trip to England and Scotland was wonderful. More than expected, much more.

It cannot go unsaid that my parents' generosity made the trip happen at all, but they also had the wisdom to know we needed help to carry something like this off. They hired a guide service, professionals to show us the way. Paul and Pauline Hulme's Homemade Holidays (http://www.homemade-holidays.com/) was recommended by friends who'd traveled with them before, and knew our white-knuckled tendencies would have never allowed us to take off to the Scottish countryside in a rental car, let alone summon the courage to sit in a small car with the drivers' seat on the right.

Paul and Pauline took care of everything, from researching Dad's family roots before we arrived, to reserving seats on the train on the scenic side of the tracks, to driving us to places we couldn't have imagined on our own. They'd come up with a tentative plan for the trip, but made it clear we could let serendipity intervene and amend the itinerary as we wished.

Now I know how the rich live. We would arrive in a country town only to be whisked into the best shop at tea time, a table for six waiting for us. We'd just happen to turn down a road that offered a spectacular view, a 17th century cemetery, or a house inhabited for 900 years. Life was easy, relaxing, enriching, chauffered.

Lest we take their services for granted, they wisely planned us to spend a day in London by ourselves at the beginning of our trip, and left it up to us to board the train to Edinburgh without a guide. This was genious, leaving us to our own anxieties and bumbling tendencies! By the time we left London, we'd made a multitude of individual and group errors, of which I will only list a sampling of my own: being too set on something, following bad advice and feeling guilty about it, letting the tension throw my back out.

And we were on our own on the way home, negotiating the lines at Heathrow and customs at O'Hare--more opportunity for appreciation of our guides! Short connections! Frank discussion with airline personnel! Injury and blood! Sweat and nausea! Delayed baggage! Here we jelled as a family, helping each other get through the experience with considerable grace on very little sleep.

Back home now. I was happy to get back to my mountains, relaxed and energized with new ideas and things to accomplish. I liked having things done for me, but was glad to get back to the work of determining my own life. We'd had a respite from our own Midwestern wait-our-turn-in-line sensibilities. Everything had magically unfolded before us for a week, carefully and invisibly planned. In addition to the sights and new perspectives which I'll share in future posts, we had the luxurious experience of being royalty, day after day.

Thank you, Paul and Pauline. Thank you, Mom and Dad and Linda.

Out and About

I will be traveling with family to London and Scotland starting this afternoon (yipee!) through June 21. Our guide says he's arranged for me to run at one of the "Chariots of Fire" locations! Will send a report when I'm back in the saddle in Van Horn in about 10 days.

y

A momentous thing happened yesterday as I walked through downtown El Paso. I was on my way to exchange dollars into British pounds for next week's trip to Scotland, since the bank teller in Van Horn got a panicky look on her face when I asked about it and had to call the main branch in Lubbock to learn that's "something that can only be done in El Paso. "

As I passed the Mexican fruit popscicle vendor offering flavors such as cantelope, watermelon, tamarind, cucumber and chile, mango, pineapple and pistachio, I started listening to my internal dialogue, those mundane snippets of thoughts that don't usually amount to much. I heard it in my head: I said "y" instead of "and."

I have not been studying the language, though I do have a dictionary and the Spanish version of "magnetic poetry" for the fridge. Mostly, I've just been listening to people talk. After almost two years here, I'm starting to think in Spanish!

Readers, Join Up!

I found a fun online resource last week, and if you like to read, you might be interested in joining. Check out www.goodreads.com, a free online book site. Sign-up and participation is easy with no obligation of any kind, and I have to warn you, it is a mite bit infectious.

I initially signed up to experiment with Texas Mountain Trail applications, and formed a "group" on goodreads based on one of our most popular TMT web pages, our booklist/itinerary of women's memoirs. We're just getting started with that.

If you're interested in learning more about my neck of the woods, please consider joining goodreads, and then the Texas Mountain Trail group. Or if you're just interested in sharing your thoughts about books and see what others are reading, give goodreads a gander.

If you decide to join, let me know, and I'll "invite" you to be my friend on the site.

Blossoms the size of a toaster

The century plants are blooming now. They aren't on a 100 year timetable, more like the schedule of a cicada. For years they sit around looking like any other agave, with beautiful succulent grey-green leaves and needle-sharp points. Then, an incredible asparagus-like shoot practically explodes out of the base, growing impressively fast. (This spring, one in Fort Davis that shot up 18 inches a DAY) The stalks come up so fast and the blooms are so large, they exhaust the plant, using up all the resources it has quietly stored up. Once they bloom, that's it, they're gonna die. But right now, they're pretty spectacular.

Now and Then (And I'm Having WAY Too Much Fun Online)

I love it when projects seem to blossom. Late in 2005, we learned that a grant I wrote for the local museum in Van Horn was succesful and our historic photograph collection would be digitized and put online at the University of North Texas Libraries' Portal to Texas History.

Because we're so far away from population centers and relatively unknown, we have to do everything we can to create awareness that we're an interesting place to visit. So, I contacted the administrator of a great blog of historical photographs, www.shorpy.com and asked if he would post some from the Clark Hotel Museum collection at the Portal. He did, and in less than an hour, 60+ people had seen our photos. As I write this at 1:40 pm Sunday, one of the photos has had over 500 hits. Here's the Texas Mountain Trail page on Shorpy, and the comment stream about this photo. When they were originally posted on Shorpy on Friday, our photos were sandwiched between some of Dorothea Lange's....I got a real kick out of that.

When one commenter wondered what the R.P. Bean Ranch looked like today, I drove out there as close as I could without tresspassing (a huge no-no out here) and took some shots. Though I couldn't get to the 1910 vantage point atop an adjacent mountain, I could get close. When the sky clears up a little (we're experiencing some uncharacteristic haze) I'll get a better view of both mountains in the original.

I'm also trying to find ways to drive special interest traffic to various pages of our website, such as the Women's Memoir reading list/travel itinerary from our www.texasmountaintrail.com/read page which is posted on a great site, goodreads.com, see it here.