Free Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois by Gardner R. Dozois Page B

Perhaps all the crowds who usually go to Spain or Italy or Florida “seeking the sun” have stayed home instead this year. (Florida, by the way, is by far the most popular destination in the States for British tourists; just about every British person we met had been to Florida, although most of them had been nowhere else in the States during their trip, and in several bookstores guides to Florida were the only travel books on U.S. destinations available—the Brits may not have seen New York City or L.A. or Washington, D.C. or Seattle, but they’ve seen Disney World . . . which must offer a somewhat distorted view of what the life in the States is like!) Have a decent if unexciting Indian meal, then have coffee and strawberry pie down the street in a little place named Crank’s. As we eat, I look out the open window-wall of the restaurant at the bustling sidewalk traffic, mostly young people out looking for one sort of action or another, and again think of myself here when I was young. Feel a pang when I think that this may well be my last glimpse of London for many years, or perhaps ever in this life.
    Go back to Euston Station, pick up our luggage, drag it to the sleeper train for Inverness. Have tea in the lounge car, and, while we are sipping it, London slips silently away behind us, without any fuss, and is gone.

    Saturday, August 19th— Inverness, Moray Firth & Polmaily House, Drumnadrochit, Urquhart Castle
    Slept fitfully, woke about 6:40. Rugged Scottish hills sliding by the train window. Stony high hills, very bleak, with purple heather on their sides. In the valleys and below the tree-line, what appear to be spruce or fir forests, with here and there trees that look like silver birches, glinting like bone in the dull green body of the woods. Lots of rabbits running away across the fields. Sit down to have a cup of coffee in the lounge car as we arrive at Aviemore. Brief drizzle later at Slough Summit, where the grey clouds clamp down overhead like an iron skillet lid, obscuring the tops of highest hills. It’s what the Irish call a “soft day”—fine constant mist, not quite rain—by the time we get to Inverness, where we get off the train.
    Check out the various posters advertising boat rides and bus and taxi tours, and then catch a cab to the car rental place, where we pick up our new car, a blue Ford Mondeo this time, which proves to be nowhere near as comfortable as our faithful Daewoo (no air conditioning, for one thing; it’s been an amusement to me throughout our trip that although our rooms weren’t air-conditioned, our car was. The Brits tend to sneer at or at least be extremely patronizing to Americans about their dependency on air-conditioning, but a few more summers like this one in Britain, and they may find themselves putting air-conditioners in as well; already, in London, we were seeing hand-lettered signs on some restaurants promising that it was “Air-conditioned inside!” or “Fully air-conditioned!” or just “Cool inside!” . . . and I remember the movie theaters using the same ploy to attract customers back in the ‘50s—remember the Chilly Willy signs outside movie houses?—when Americans didn’t have home air-conditioners either).
    Drive through town and down to the harbor, where we park at dockside and book passage on the Moray Firth Dolphin-Watching Cruise. Inverness doesn’t seem to be a terribly pretty or terribly interesting town, striking me as an unpretentious no-nonsense no-frills working-class town, an impression confirmed or at least emphasized for me when we walk around the harbor area while waiting for the cruise to leave, strolling around the corner and over a bridge to a quiet, working-class neighborhood: a sleeping pub, a laundromat, a take-away fish-and-chips shop, and a bakery, where I buy a “potato pie” (something like an inferior Cornish Pastie) and a “battery,” which turns out to be a greasy lump of cold fried dough or batter (hence the