-by Frank Macdonald
We returned this week from a two-week visit to Scotland with enough stories to fill several columns but I’ve chosen just one for this week. The one I’ve chosen is easy to tell because I was witness (and only witness) to the entire ride.
There were three of us, Virginia, our friend Patsy and myself, and an itinerary that took in a huge chunk of western Scotland and the Hebrides, all made possible through the renting of a car. Without going into detail, the first car we rented had to be towed back from near the bridge at Skye to the Inverness airport where it was exchanged for another. They had no more automatics, so we took possession of a standard shift.
No problem, I said, explaining that I have never owned anything but a standard. It was dark as we began our journey across the city from the airport to a hurriedly booked hotel. I drove.
Despite my years of driving experience, there were a few differences to be dealt with, such as a different country, a different side of the road, a different side for the steering wheel, and the difference between shifting gears with your left hand instead of your right, a standard shift into which they threw an extra sixth gear just for laughs. I was coping with these differences in the after- dark traffic while taking directions from our designated navigator who added “driving instructor” to her credentials within five minutes of leaving the airport.
“Watch the curb,” she said, as I drove over one. “Just taking a shortcut,” I explained.
“Three rotaries coming up, and in the first one you...no, you don’t keep driving around the circle, go that way...”
The full account of my driving, delivered upon arrival at the hotel by two ashen-faced passengers, was that besides being blind-sided by a few curbs, I had ticked against some other car’s side view mirror, and bullied a large truck to the side of the road, a truck that I thought, in an understandable mental lapse, was on my side of the road.
In the hotel, my shaken-not-stirred mates, being of a single mind, forced an act of democracy upon me. The vote was unanimous (because I didn’t have one – they had apparently evoked Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Fair Elections Act ). Patsy would do the driving, Virginia would continue to read the map, and I would...well, I would just sit there and shut up. Considering my lack of options or allies, I conceded.
The following morning we set off for Skye again.
We had a driver, a navigator and a passenger. I felt like the vice president of the United States or the PTA, having nothing much to do but get out occasionally to pump gas. I did get to look a lot, so I spent a long stretch of the road looking for the Loch Ness monster, cell phone cocked and ready for the shoot.
You know what they say about we Scots, eh? That we’re stingy. That applies to pavement as much as it does to money. Skinny little roads. Busy ones, though. Still, there was lots more to see than not seeing the Loch Ness monster in my role as tourist in a car that wouldn’t have gotten a traffic ticket if Patsy had been driving down the aisle of a supermarket. She was adjusting to all the things I apparently didn’t adjust to the night before, which seemed strange, her having grown up in Australia where they do driving things as backwards as they do in Scotland.
“But I never drove a car until I came to Canada,” she explained, which explained her occasionally gripping the wheel like a chicken’s wrung neck, knuckles whiter than the whole of last winter. This would happen when she encountered moments of “which way do I go?” signage confusion, but not confusion enough to turn the wheel over to me.
When we got off the ferry from Skye to North Uist, the road got skinnier than a super model. It was a single lane for two-way traffic, with a protocol that expected one driver or the other to pull over and give way. Our car was in a constant state of surrender. Whatever speck appeared upon the road’s horizon, truck, car, motorcycle, scooter, bicycle, ewe, hobbling old men, a substantial lump of manure, they all had the right of way.
Not that I wasn’t appreciative of the fact that so much of the travelling responsibility fell to my fellow voyagers. I wasn’t resentful. Who really wants to run over old men and sheep? And to demonstrate that appreciation, when we returned the car to its rightful owner and continued via train and plane to find our way back to Canada, I volunteered to drive us all the way from the Halifax airport, an undertaking accomplished without mishap, my confidence restored.
