Tuesday, 30 March 2010
The British Isles, Day Eleven: Driving to Cumbria
This is an article in my ongoing series about our trip through the British Isles. Earlier articles include the Introduction,Stonehenge, Oxford, Driving to Wales, Anglesey, Crossing the Irish Sea, Dublin, Northern Ireland, Ferry to Scotland, Falkirk & Bo'ness, Edinburgh, and Loch Ness.
On the eleventh day of our trip we awoke at the northernmost point of our whole voyage: for ten days we had been heading north from France (albeit by a very circuitous route, with detours through Wales and Ireland!). This day would mark the point at which we turned back, and began heading for home. Because we wanted to visit as much as possible on our way back, this meant that this day, in which we were retreading ground already covered, was about hurrying up and getting past all that to reach the new stuff. So, it was a big driving day. That was fine by me, as the highlands were a beautiful place to drive, and I was enjoying the local flavour of talk radio on BBC Scotland on the way.
I mentioned before that the highlands are a vast, empty land. This is why Inverness was such a choke point for tourists: there's nowhere else to go! It's also why we had to retread ground we'd already covered: there were no alternative routes back south to take.
None of this was on my mind much as I listened to talk radio on the highway though. On the traffic report, they did keep reporting on a major accident on the highway we were on, so I kept a lookout for the detour, but nothing more.
Well, eventually we ran into the accident, and traffic backed up. In fact, traffic stopped. In fact, traffic stayed stopped. For ten minutes. Then twenty minutes. "I can't believe this, I was keeping my eyes pealed for a detour and never saw one," I thought to myself. Eventually people started getting out of their cars. One older Scotsman, clearly a highlander, shook his head at the few who tried to turn around their cars and head back up the highway, going the wrong way (this was a mountain highway and the lanes for cars going the opposite direction were about 150 yards below us). "We checked the atlas and there are no other roads south," he told another driver. That's when it dawned on me why there was no detour: this was the only road south, period. So, there was nothing to do but wait for the accident to get cleared up.
All in all we were stopped for two hours, which put quite a damper on our time. Fortunately we had everything we needed to eat in the car and keep the baby happy, so we were better off than a lot of drivers. I joked to Emilie that something had to go wrong at some point, with such a complicated trip, so it was just as well to get our hiccup out of the way now. (I was too optimistic, however: the real low point of our trip comes later.)
Because we were travelling with a baby, though, I had planned huge margins into our itinerary, so we still rolled into Carlisle before it was too late. That was another interesting experience: the border between England and Scotland is empty. Compared to the dense population of the Lowlands, it seems odd to have such a wasteland dividing two countries that have been united for over 300 years—France and Germany have less desolate boarders, and they've been enemies since Roman times!
Anyway, had we not had our unscheduled delay we might have had time to visit Carlisle itself, but as it was we could only check into the hotel and then go out and scavange some Chinese food. Stay tuned for the next day, however, which was one of the best of the trip, beginning with an excursion into Northumbria to see Hadrian's wall!
