It was the worst of times . . .
As far as our various adventures have gone, this one was probably the most . . . let’s say challenging. Of course any extended vacation will have bumps along the way, especially if you’re traveling on your own (for the most part) and if you’re traveling in a foreign country and to locations you’re visiting for the first time. But this one must top the list. Which is saying something because if you have followed this blog for awhile, you know that one of those trips included a failed alternator that interrupted 4 days of travel and another trip that required spontaneous changes of plan to avoid the effects of a typhoon - in Utah! That’s not to say we didn’t get some good photography done or that we didn’t see some incredible landscapes - we did - but the hurdles we had to overcome this trip to keep our spirits up and to keep moving forward seemed unrelenting. Nevertheless, we endeavored throughout and it was nice having three weeks off from work.
To start on a positive note, driving on the left hand side of the road wasn’t as bad as I’d expected in the Bimobil, though the narrow English countryside roads were occasionally terrifying (just ask Ann). Scotland does a much better job of having passing pull-outs on their narrow roads. Also, I understood their various accents much better than I thought I would, except for that stop for a bite in Newcastle (was that even English they were speaking?). But this post is about the . . . frustrating aspects of the trip, so I’ll lay them out in increasing order of severity.
I don’t know why I would think that a bunk on a ferry would be comfortable, but I did. The gentle rocking of the ship did its best to put me to sleep, but the bed on the ferry trip over was horrible, the room was hot and there felt like there was no air circulation (think airplane cabin). And the young chaps in the next room coming back from the bar at 2 am didn’t help much either. I woke up tired and sore from what I was hoping would be a good night’s start to the vacation. Ann didn’t fare any better. At least the bunks and room on the trip back were better.
We had expected the English weather to be . . . well, English weather. In some ways, it didn’t disappoint. Except for the fact that pretty much all of our time in Scotland - whether the Isle of Skye or Glencoe - gave us heavy clouds, dense fog, near-gale force winds and rain. We, unfortunately, did not get the, “It may be pouring now, but just wait 10 minutes and it will change” weather we were expecting (and hoping for). That kind of weather tends to produce great photographic opportunities. We got it once, kinda, in Skye - a nice 10 minute window of sunlight after waiting to make photographs for an hour in a heavy, windy drizzle. It poured most of the remainder of of the day and once the rains stopped, the winds kicked up. And we got a nice half-day of photographing in Glencoe. We later found out that our Scotland weather was because a high system had settled into northern England, which dried out the Lake District a bit so that the waterfalls were nice by the time we got there. Our arrival to England saw us at the end of a wet period with raging torrents of water in all the rivers and creeks, which totally killed my shot list of waterfalls at the very beginning of the trip. On the plus side, we didn’t see any real rain during our workshop so . . . no, I wouldn’t call it even.
While driving the English roads went better than I’d expected (as was my mental conversion to driving on the wrong side of the road), they were not incident free. Unavoidable branches (think driving down a narrow lane with branches brushing both sides of the vehicle) left their share of marks on the mirrors and our electrical plug cover. That was really nothing compared to the horror of hearing a screech as I mentally let down my guard going through a slate wall gate coming out of a natural area. Fortunately, the damage was only a cap and the side rubber bumper designed for precisely that type of protection. There was no damage to the vehicle or cabin body or to the slide rail that holds the rubber bumper strip. Nothing a few strips of duct tape couldn’t cover up. Thank goodness it pretty much matched the color of the vehicle. I’ll be putting in an email to Bimobil soon for a 9-foot strip of rubber bumper and a new end cap . . . and probably a new cover for the electrical plug while I’m at it.
While we’re on the vehicle, we had a major scare with it as we were driving from Skye to Glencoe. We started hearing an odd wobbling sound at low velocities early that morning, and later on during the day, some serious vibrations at higher speeds. I stopped to check the tires, but they and everything else I checked out looked fine. We completed the 2-hour drive down to Glencoe, but once we were at our campsite we decided to seriously check things out. After an email and phone exchange with our trusted folks at Iveco Schouten, Henk recommended we get it checked out. Henk gave me a number for Iveco UK he wasn’t sure was the right one to use and also said I could try a dealer. I found the closest Iveco dealer (in Glasgow 2 hours away) and talked with them a bit. They suggested I call a number (the same one Henk gave me) and said if the vehicle was under warranty, Iveco UK would go to great lengths to fix it - but the dealer couldn’t tell if we were still under warranty. I then called the number, they checked and indeed we were (yet another unanticipated benefit from not being able to register the vehicle in Portugal - if we had, the warranty would have been expired). They then contacted Iveco headquarters (in Italy) and Italy coordinated for a driver to come up from Glasgow to do the repair. We told them that it could wait until the morning (it was past 6 pm at that point) because we were safely in a campground. Next morning a repair truck from the place we’d called originally showed up. Thankfully we made the call because the bolts connecting the engine to the rear wheel driveshaft had come loose. After a few minutes of trouble shooting the problem, some loctite and a sturdy wrench had us on our way. If those bolts had come totally off, it would have been a disaster, possibly totaling the vehicle. As it was, we lost only one-half day of photography (though on the one day we had sun and clouds in Glencoe).
Those are some pretty rough bumps for a vacation - agree? We thought so too, thinking that bad things come in threes and at least three of those had to count. Nope, they didn’t. We’re just moving onto the three more serious bumps.
First, Ann scratched one of her favorite lenses during the first week of the trip. She had commented that she thought that a hair had gotten onto the sensor of her camera or something because she had seen this really odd smear on some of the images she’d made during one of our early morning sessions. I checked the sensor and it looked good. I checked the front and rear of one of the lenses she was using - fine. I checked the front of the other lens she used - good. Flipped that lens over and . . . OMG. Something somehow had scratched the rear element of the lens. I first tried cleaning the lens, hoping it was an oil smear or something superficial like that, but nope. Even through a polishing cloth I could feel the scratch. We’ve already sent the lens off for a repair, but Ann had to go through the rest of the trip without one of her favorite lenses.
Second, we received an urgent email from Light and Land, the folks who organized our workshop, while we were in Glencoe. Apparently, while we were in Skye, Joe Cornish was up on a mountain in mainland Scotland and, in windy conditions, had a rather nasty spill that required him to be airlifted to a hospital. He would be unable to do our workshop. They found a replacement for Joe (ok, pretty much nobody can “replace” Joe, let’s call Astrid a substitute, kinda like Leo Messi being injured for a game so they substitute . . . pretty much anyone else in the world - quite the step down) so the workshop would continue, but Joe wouldn’t be there. I won’t go into details, but we think Joe is facing a long, hopefully successful recovery. That of course is more important than our missing out, yet again, on a workshop with Joe Cornish, but it was just one more added disappointment from the trip. We do hope he recovers fully and quickly.
Third, and not least, were the election results. Throughout the trip we had people talk with us about the upcoming election. Everyone here knows that US elections affect them and the rest of the world greatly. Nobody favored the result that followed. Most asked if we had already voted, and approved when we told them who we voted for. Our colleagues at the workshop (a great bunch of people) tried to cheer us up and were positive about the outcome on Election Day. And all were as stunned as we were at the results the next morning. On our last day photographing, a gentleman walked up to Ann and said, “Are you an American?” When Ann replied yes, he said, “I want to apologize on behalf of evangelical churches. I attend an evangelical church here in the UK and we do not support what the US evangelical movement is doing and who they have supported. They do not represent all of us.” This was after the election. Needless to say, we are dumbfounded. I no longer feel I understand what America means if we, as a people and a country, can elect a person like this as our leader. Who knows how long I’ll be practicing news avoidance behavior.
So that’s it, the worst of the worst of our trip. With that out of the way I hope I can write about our adventures and our struggles and successes with photography. On the bright side of things, I think I made some good images this trip - despite the . . . distractions. The images for this post were selected because of the mood (and the weather we encountered), but they do not represent everything we saw on the trip. So join us in subsequent posts as I work my way through the images I made on our grand UK adventure.