It is hard to believe this is only day five since we flew into France on a 6am flight from Edinburgh. What a whirlwind this has been, and how full our memory banks are feeling already. Albeit, our actual bank account has not fared quite so well.
But, oh well… c’est la vie.
We have landed in the quiet seaside village of Talmont-Saint-Hilaire and are unwinding in a cosy apartment with our own kitchen and the sight and sound of waves crashing beyond our window.
Looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, we are now in countdown mode for a good friend’s 60th birthday, only a few days away. We are very excited to see more good friends and come together to share stories about the various adventures abroad that have brought us all to this final part of our travels.
It will be a huge celebration and grand finale for many of us. Our birthday girl herself has just returned from a very impressive 20-day, 400-kilometre pilgrimage from Tuscany to Rome, so her night of celebration will be riding on a particular high.
And so here I find myself with a spare afternoon beside another window in another country, realising we have reached our final country and the pièce de résistance of the whole adventure.
But one thing we have learnt over the past few years, since Les’s cancer diagnosis — thankfully now in remission, though we are forever aware of the realities of that verdict — along with the loss of parents, and the devastating news of the same cursed disease spreading to some of our very closest and dearest friends, is that we are more intent than ever to live, feel and experience whatever we can, whenever we can.
And here I go, meandering off course once again.
Please stay with me. I do have a point to all of this, which will hopefully make more sense to you, the reader, and to me as well, as the words land on the page and explode out of my head and heart.
So, looking back out of my French seaside window, as I take time to breathe in the sound of birds chirping and waves crashing — oh, and the washing machine working hard to return our dwindling underwear supply…..it feels like now or never, once again, to get my thoughts down about where we have been since the last sign-off from the Krakow window.
And for the record, I really didn’t want to leave Krakow.
Out of all the places we have been, I wanted more of that city than any other. We were both unwell on that leg of the trip, and our bed didn’t want us in it. We could tell by the way either one of us would roll out if the other moved an inch. So we were tired, but that didn’t stop the feeling that I wanted so much more of the city than the five days we had.
It is one city — and one country — I feel sure I will return to. Not many places leave that calling card in a person’s heart when they leave. I have a few now, and many that I have loved but not yearned to return to. I already had Italy, Ireland and Scotland , hence why we were on our way there for a second trip — but Poland has now also left its echo in my heart, and I am already placating my grief at leaving with reassurances that I will be back.
So, off we headed from Krakow and on to Prague.
Everyone I know who has been to Prague said, “Oh Prague. Oh yes, you will love it!”
And we did . Beautiful Prague. With the Charles Bridge, the Old Town Square, museums, music, trees and history. It had it all. But so close on the heels of Krakow, Gdańsk and Warsaw, I couldn’t shake the emotional bias that had anchored me back in the country of my father’s birth. Prague was lovely, but to me, not as beautiful as Krakow.
Les tended to agree with me. But like any good husband travelling while already tired, lugging around five times more luggage than he actually packed or needed for himself, and managing an overly emotional wife, I suspect he knew that agreeing with me was in his best interest.
I will say that we had a very luxurious apartment in Prague, and that bed was definitely happy to have us in it. We also found a fabulous riverside taphouse , we discovered it like a secret treasure which magically appeared one day through an old tunnel glistening in sunshine and it served up cocktails, fantastic beer and decadent pizzas, with 80s rock and roll hits played by live musicians all afternoon, every day. That part was fun and made us smile a lot.
We also managed to attend a symphony orchestra concert with an opera singer in the Chapel of Mirrors in the Old Town, also a stone’s throw from our luxurious apartment, and that gave us a high as well. The history is as rich as anywhere else, and we were so glad to have visited, but we don’t think we will be back — or at least, our hearts are not longing to return.
But never say never.
So, with our excessive luggage growing by the kilo every other day, along with our waistlines, and our now customary hour or more spent strategically trying to redistribute weight and calculate restrictions for the next budget airline we were on, we waved goodbye to the great city of Prague and headed to Glasgow.
It was our second trip to Scotland, but last time we hadn’t seen Glasgow, so we thought it might be a good starting point for our Central and Highland Scotland adventure. And it was a good starting point, but not nearly enough to form an opinion. So while we liked it, it didn’t get under our skin like Edinburgh did last trip. Returning is a soft maybe.
We then headed off towards Inverness under days of continual glorious sunshine, which gradually gave way to wind, mist and the type of Scottish rain that seemed fitting, in some strange way, for the day we chose to visit Culloden.
Like Auschwitz, the emotions and words in that sad place settled in our hearts with a dull ache and a silence that did not feel quite right for this blog. Too deep and sombre and too much a part of what many people already know.
Like many multi-generation Australians of Anglo-Celtic blood, I had several ancestors from clans with names directly linked to my own family tree who fell at Culloden. But that is another blog, or perhaps a private family update, for another day.
What did get under our skin — deep into both our hearts — was the Highlands.
This part of the trip was meaningful for both of us. Les had mapped the whole sector out himself, spending hours researching routes, distances and interesting places to stay. He did it for both of us, in part because we both have genetic threads leading us back here: mine through my maternal line, and his through his paternal line, both confirmed through Ancestry DNA. Pretty well 50% for Les in the mid to lower part of Scotland, to match his other Maltese 50%, and for me 30% Highlands and 20% Northern Ireland.
But I also know that, in large part, he planned this Highland journey just for me.
When we first moved to Tasmania four years ago to start our lives afresh, Les was still coming through the long battle of chemotherapy after his shock stage 4 cancer diagnosis. Like many cancer survivors, hardship survivors and battlers of all kinds, one tends to see life and time and priorities through a different lens afterwards.
We certainly did. And still do.
I think in many ways we can say thanks to cancer, fear and hardship for stoking that flame in us, and giving us a bigger, bolder and brighter view of the horizon ahead. We count our blessings that Les came through his, and our hearts break for those not so lucky, but while revelling in gratitude, Les has taken to our small farm under the southern skies like a duck to water. He has also helped ignite my long-stifled desire to write into a bigger reality than ever before.
I love him so much for all of that, and for the effort he put into this part of the trip.
And the trip did exactly what it was intended to do.
On our last trip, we had come by car ferry to Turnberry. We even had a cocktail at Trump’s golf course, which I admit now with some reluctance. On that journey, we stayed mostly on that side of Scotland. To be honest, we had an experience on the Isle of Lismore, meeting the head of the Livingstone clan and being plied with gin and tonics at 9am by the Baron of Bachuil, that probably deserves a blog of its own.
But for this blog, let it sit on the record that I was inspired to return and dig more deeply into my maternal Scottish ancestry very much as a result of that experience.
And now for context.
I started writing a novel two years ago, just for fun and to practise while participating in a Write Your Novel course. A requirement was to have at least, or be close to, 20,000 words of a novel before you could start.
My biggest novel ambition was, and is, the historical semi-fictional story of my Polish grandmother and great–grandmother and their stories of resilience and survival. It will be a huge project, and one I have felt too humbled, and perhaps not deserving enough, even to write about. They are biologically my heroines, but I didn’t grow up with them. I have struggled with my sense of not being worthy or skilled enough, and still struggle.
So my plan arrived out of the forced 20,000 words I had to write. I wanted to write a made-up historical fiction story about two other women, as a type of practice run. I could let my imagination run wild and not get weighed down by feelings of inadequacy representing a true story I do not feel wholly entitled to tell.
So, on a whim, Scotland and my mother’s own ancestors came to me.
I don’t know if they are her ancestors, of course, because their names, their lives and their hardships all just popped into my head as I found them on the page. And when they arrived, they arrived with such force that I was quite amazed by how deeply visual their landscape, voices, stories, families and names became as they came rushing into my head. I felt their pain and their grief. I felt cold when they were cold and I felt loved and light when they were happy. This is how I want to feel when I eventually write within the new confounds of fiction versus reality for my actual grandmother and great grandmother. But with these two strong willed Scottish women I had no such internal barrier. They were and are as real to me as I could have ever hoped
I’m not overly superstitious, but… quite honestly, I have since discovered names and places in my actual family tree that run in direct parallel to the characters born in my head without any prior knowledge.
I have to wonder.
And there was an old abandoned church that showed itself to me as I wrote. It arrived on the very first page. I could see it as clearly as if I had been there a thousand times. This old church, with its ruins by the sea, became an anchor for my story, and eventually I thought I should Google it and check whether any such place existed. If it did, even if it was only slightly similar to mine, maybe I could let my curious mind — that occasionally likes to consider itself a tad clairvoyant, laugh if you must — believe there may be something in it. I have always felt a little witchy like this.
And it turns out there is.
Not just vaguely similar, enough to put some fluff and cement around my story, but a place that is 100% the same place, in the same part of Scotland. I know because last week Les and I went there.
It is an old chapel, with the same old and newer headstones scattered outside. It is, like my story, originally built in the 13th century, though my story takes place a few hundred years later.
So, while we had many big, emotional and deeply moving experiences in the stunning landscape of Scotland, the day we parked the car and made the long walk across bridges and over hills to the edge of the cliff that looked over the North Sea, we stood there, just the two of us.
Not another soul anywhere — well, not a living human one anyway.
The place was thick with energy, some dark and some light, and for me it was beguiling and deeply magnetic. This place wasn’t obvious online, so I hadn’t conjured it from pictures. It is rather an obscure location, but I had conjured it from somewhere, somehow, because without any doubt, this was the place that had anchored my story. Embedded in the dormant 20,000 words that have been sitting silent and neglected, like this church, for the last two years.
We stayed for over an hour, and Les, in his gentle, wise way, slipped away and let me immerse myself. Their story came flooding back into my head.
In fact, on the drive back from the church, and through all the days that followed, the story was so big and revealing that I could feel tension in my bones, in my belly. I was barely able to concentrate on the sightseeing that followed.
Mission accomplished.
Book one is worming around in my head, and my characters are screaming at me to get their tales down on paper.
But in the meantime, because we still have a few dollars left in our dwindled bank account to throw around on cocktails and oysters and baguettes — and chocolate croissants, ofcourse — we finished our Scotland trip on a high. We promised ourselves we will return, but only after I have finished writing my book.
Either way, Scotland is under our skin and deep in our hearts. The rain, the cold, the sunshine, the stodgy food and excellent whisky. All of it. Just like Poland, we know that Scottish soil will fall beneath our feet another time.
We had a hilarious Irish host at an equally hilarious pub stay in Thurso, who did his best to impersonate Mrs Brown.
On our third-last day, already booked to fly to France from Edinburgh, he told us that leaving without doing a lap of the upper west coast of Scotland would be like leaving without seeing the jewel in the crown of the whole country.
As an Irishman who comes from another stunning landscape, we took his advice on board. But with no time left, and in actual fact, quite a few jewels already in our hearts, we felt we had earned at least a glimpse of the Scotland crown. We will go back and see if his advice stacks up. His hotel sure didn’t, but that was part of the whole Scottish adventure.
And now we are in France.with more to see and two weeks to go.
We have been here before, but not to this district. As ever, France is sexy, mildly arrogant, subtly beautiful and delicious in every way.
The food, the landscapes and this new region have been a beautiful final layer of fresh experiences in a fabulous and multi-layered trip.
And with more than a week to go, a party to enjoy, and only twelve dresses and four pairs of shoes to choose from, we remain focused on what is still to come and grateful for all that has been offered — heart, soul and body.
But Tassie is waiting for us, and so is our golden retriever Stella, whom we have missed more than anything else.
Sorry kids, we love you all, but Stella……..we are nearly home.
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