Glasgow to Oban

Time in-country before someone called me "dear", 1 day, 1 hour.

At the bus station, (happy I'd pre-booked a bus from Glasgow to Oban weeks ago because the bus was full) the automatic doors weren't working, two British women, perhaps 70-ish, dragging too much luggage, couldn't figure out how to get into the building. So, I put down my diet coke, got off my butt and opened the emergency exit door for them. Oh, I was such a dear.

The bus took the leisurely route up the coast, past moors rushing with waterfalls and the palest of flowering purple heather, past oyster farms, past Loch Lomond. The gentleman in the seat next to me was wearing an unfortunate, eye-watering cologne. Dropped off on a street corner in sunshine in Oban across from the harbor, I found the tourist office who gave me directions to the car rental office, a mere 6 blocks of luggage dragging away. The office was filled with a group of 4 people from Colorado renting two cars, complaining because the automatic cars were big diesel Land Rovers. And the woman behind the counter patiently explaining, it was all they had. They went in and out and complained and fussed. I waited 30 minutes for them to complete their checkout. And then they drove off. The woman blinked twice and said, "who are you? Aren't you with them?" So, I gave her my name and my confirmation number and said I was there to pick up my car. To which she told me they had no more automatic transmission cars, she'd given the last one away.

So, I blinked and said, "no, that's not possible. I reserved a car weeks and weeks ago. I have a confirmation number. I came 20 minutes behind them and I'm just screwed?" And she said, "I've been trying for days to get enough cars. I've been praying that you knew how to drive a manual transmission." Do I look like a stupid American that would pay twice the money to rent a car if I could get by with a manual? So, I said I go out and try. I'd see if I could drive the car around the block, but I haven't driven a manual transmission in over twenty years and that was huge trucks that I checked out of the motor pool while a summer intern for the Navy and they shifted on the column and were, well, big enough that people let you drift through intersections. But I would try. Step 1 was to back the car up. I tried to back up, the engine stalled. I tried to back up, cheating with the parking brake, it stalled. She fluttered around suggesting that she could back it up first and we could go from there. And I explained that sooner or later I was going to get into a spot where I had to move in reverse and she wasn't going to be there.

We went inside. Me, having a jet lag fueled bad temper moment. I didn't have reservations for Oban for the night. I had a wonderful hotel, already paid for, waiting for me in Portree on the Isle of Skye and no way to get there. So, I took a deep breath and asked if she could get me a car on Monday. She started to flutter with her papers again. She'd tried, she'd called, they'd been moving cars back and forth all week, trying to cover for this problem and hadn't solved it. I asked her to call the other offices again, ask whether they would have a car on Monday. It turned out that there was an automatic car sitting at that moment in Glasgow at the airport. I groaned. I'd spent 3 and a half hours on a bus coming from Glasgow. But she found a driver to go and fetch the car, so I could have it that night. Too late to get to the Isle of Skye, but tomorrow wasn't completely lost. She ended up driving me to the tourist office to find a hotel for the night, so she would know where to deliver the car. And we wait while the woman behind the counter calls 10-20 different places, but they're all full. And I'm saying, really, I'm not fussy. Anything. Anything.

The only place with an empty room was a one star called the Kelvin Hotel.

And since I was there for the day, the sun shining, I climbed to the top of the hill to see McCaig's Tower.

It immediately began to hail; a wind so strong I would barely stand. Soaking wet, I retreated to the coffee shop for a hot latte with a lovely British couple there on holiday because they don't like the heat, because 6 months he had turned to her in Switzerland and said, have you ever been to Scotland?

The hotel bar where I went for a pint to wait for the car rental people to drop by with the car featured the young male bartender vacuuming the worn patches of carpet while a 20-something regular with an accordion while his two friends sang and whoops and fell over each other laughing.

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