Travel Pet Peeves   There is nothing more inane or pretentious than finding your toilet paper pointed in a hotel room, and now they do it everywhere. My feeling is, if it is worth doing, they should send someone in to re-point it after each use. And now they do it to the kleenex, too. Most hotels now provide tom-toms in each room. They were originally meant to be wastepaper baskets, but with the advent of plastic liners for wastebaskets, the service people decided it would be more entertaining to provide some rhythm, so they stretch the plastic "liner" across the top of the basket. Anything tossed onto this surface will make the required musical thump and then bounce onto the floor. The expression "no problem" has now conquered the world.

Mats   Foot-and-mouth worries are everywhere. Often when walking in or out of a public building you find you're walking over some soggy carpeting which is full of disinfectant. The cars getting on and off the ferries go through puddles of disinfectant. And when we arrived in Scotland, there was a detour sign on the road to pull into a parking area that had been converted to two road bumps with disinfectant in between. We now have the cleanest shoe leather and tyres around.

Quotes   When we were in the Middlebury German Summer School years ago, in one class we had to memorize various quotes to help practice pronunciation. I though it was a bother at the time, but a number of them have stayed with me. These two are from Goethe, the first from his 1788 play Egmont, and the second from his 1783 poem Das Göttliche ("The Divine"):

The reason I bring this up now is that every time someone helps us with the wheelchair I think of:

I was kidding when I said that when we had the puncture, sitting Bev in the wheelchair next to the car was like putting cheese in a mousetrap, but it often works that way. Doors often fly open when we arrive. The other day in Ireland I parked outside of Kilkenny Castle, and rolling along the sidewalk was fine, but then at the entrance to the castle were stones--cobblestones would have been hard enough, but these were little round stones set upright in concrete. And it was uphill to the bargain. You should have seen people hop to it. And while they were at it, they continued bringing the chair over the soggy mat. Hilfreich und gut. I do think about the little old lady who didn't really want to cross the street but did so to make the boy scout happy. That hasn't happened yet, but it's come close.

We left Galway on the west coast of the Republic on Thursday and drove across the island to the North to see Armagh, spend the night in Belfast, and be ready to take the car ferry to Scotland on Friday. I was glad to see that the route I wanted to take, the N54, ran interestingly: after Cavan it crossed for a short distance into Northern Ireland, then came out again to Monaghan in the Republic, before finally going into the North again. It was interesting to see the back-and-forth contrast. The Republic looks a bit more prosperous, but that could be my imagination. But can you ever see politics in the road signs. All road signs, town names as well as directions, in the Republic are bilingual, in Gaelic and English:

and as I've said, distances are now in kilometers universally. (By the way, the Gaelic is always lower case and the English capitalized, so you can quickly spot the language you want to read, in contrast to what the Welsh have recently done, where both languages are capitalized.) But as we popped in and out of the North, it was so obvious that the signs were resolutely in English alone, and still in miles. In the Republic, even signs referring to northern cities were, of course bilingual:

In the north you'd better believe that the second one is Londonderry. London's name was attached to Derry centuries ago to show who's boss.

Talk about bumping into interesting things. I thought we'd had our share of serendipity when we found the step dancing, but that wasn't the end of it. We came across not one, but two of the parades in Northern Ireland.

When I planned this trip, Michelin told me that July 12 was a holiday in Northern Ireland, but I didn't think anything of it. That was the day it worked out for us to be there. But a few days before the fact I realized that it was their parade day.

By the way, the US media always uses the terms Protestant and Catholic to refer to the two factions. Although there certainly is a religious element involved, particularly in references to "anti-popeism", the terms universally used here for the two sides are Loyalists and Republicans. I think that terminology is much clearer.

Another term I've only heard in the US for the Loyalists is Scotch-Irish (over the last three centuries Scottish, and English, settlers settled this part of Ireland that is physically closest to Britain). A large number of our earliest presidents were "Scotch-Irish" and not until Kennedy was one "Irish-Irish".

Anyway, when we crossed into the North on this trip (there are no border checks--it's like driving from New York into Connecticut). The first thing we saw was a huge fortress-like police station with TV cameras checking incoming cars. I know they have to be careful about terrorism, but this looked like East Germany. In the first village, probably because of the holiday, there were three British soldiers with machine guns. As we drove around Armagh sightseeing, at the cathedral there was a jeep with a soldier walking around with a machine gun. Charming. I had noticed earlier that the route I would be taking went from Armagh through Portadown to Belfast, and I remembered from past years hearing on TV that Portadown one of the most ultra-Loyalist parades, but I figured let's see what happens. It was late afternoon, and we came right across the parade. The Orangemen were out in force. They wear orange sashes and all the banners in the parade are bordered in orange. After a while we left and went to Belfast. We couldn't get to the hotel I'd booked because their parade was going down the same street, and traffic was being diverted. I took a look at their parade as well, and we changed hotels. The Shankill Road neighborhood, where you often hear of riots taking place, especially in response to the provocative parades, lies to the northwest of Belfast, but I saw a few kids with rocks in their hands. I heard on TV that night that there was rioting in a few areas, and that petrol bombs were being thrown. Lovely. Another day in Northern Ireland.

The remaining comments on Ireland are editorial in nature rather than reportorial.

Ireland's situation is in my view the result of gaining independence too early in the century. The Easter Rebellion was in 1917 and independence in 1922. That was at the height of the power of the British Empire and a tremendous rebuff to Britain, especially so close to home. Britain at that time did not bite the bullet and make a clean break. Instead it gerrymandered a border around British Ireland giving loyalists a majority and vowed to stick with them. The result is the "26 and 6" situation--26 counties in the Republic, including three Ulster counties, and the remaining 6 Ulster counties in the north.

However, in the latter part of the century, when the British and French empires began to collapse the situation was very different. For instance, there were a lot of ethnic French in Algeria, people whose families had moved there centuries ago. Those were the years of the slogan "Algérie française", but DeGaulle bit the bullet, liberated Algeria, and repatriated those French (the pieds noirs) who wanted to resettle in France. If Britain had done that in 1922 there wouldn't be this situation today.

Those marchers I saw could have been chanting "Irlande britannique". It's the same thing, except they got their way and the French in Algeria didn't. I think all the orange banners and sashes I saw were as provocative to the other part of the population as if they had been white hoods. A counter-parade would have been a more peaceful response than the rioting, but rioting is what happens. And as East Germany was a rump state that eventually blended into the major part of the country, that can be the only solution in Ireland. But I don't know how.

Scotland   When we got off the ferry, of course we both sang: You take the high road, and I'll take the low road, and I'll be in Scotland afore ye...

We're so far north, and the first day of summer only having been a few weeks ago, at 10:30 it isn't totally dark yet. I've had a glass of Drambuie after dinner every night (think local!). We stopped in Glasgow after the ferry, but I have the same opinion as I did the first time: it's nice, but there's not much to see, like Atlanta or San Diego. We did look up two buildings by Charles Rennie Mackintosh that we'd heard about on the ship. But I scheduled all three nights in Scotland in Edinburgh, and it's beautiful (Edinboro to Americans, Edinbruh to the British). Edinburgh Castle (Photo by Saffron Blaze) and the old city are up on Castle Rock, the 17C Georgian New Town is to the north and there are vistas everywhere, including down to the Firth of Forth. I've always wanted to see the 1890 Firth of Forth (Rail) Bridge (Photo by Kim Traynor) and we did so today. We stopped by St. Andrews and looked at the golf course. We went to Stirling and saw the Wallace monument, and I had to laugh. The monument to William Wallace was built during a burst of interest in him in the 19C, but the new burst of interest in him came out when Mel Gibson played him in "Braveheart". And at the foot of the monument is a statue of Wallace by a sculptor who was inspired by the movie. And of course, the figure of Wallace looks like Mel Gibson.