The next morning, we pack our bags and head downstairs. Again, I go outside to scrape the snow and ice off our car before sitting down to a full platter of eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, and grilled mushrooms and tomatoes. After breakfast, we stop by the Rothiemurchus visitor center where we pick up a tuxedo cat oven mitt and a free postcard. An icy mix is coming down as we rejoin the A9 and head out of the Cairngorms, windshield defroster at full blast. The highway follows the valley of the River Spey southward before curving east to follow the River Garry. We soon leave the Grampian Mountains - and the Scottish Highlands - behind. The snow disappears as we descend into the rolling, rich farmlands of Perthshire.
Near Dunkeld, we turn off the highway and drive east through the countryside to Blairgowrie, a quiet agricultural town of just over 8000 people. In the suburbs, I park the car on a residential street off of Perth Road, and we cross the street and head into the Ardblair Woods. This place is a world apart from the snowy highland plateaus of the Cairngorms, or the windswept island moors of Skye. The grass is beautifully lush and green, and the path winds in and out of the woods, taking us through newly plowed berry fields and behind vast yards of pastureland. Crossing west through the farmland, we arrive at a circular hill covered in trees, looking very much like a magical woodland grove from a Miyazaki film. We open a farm gate and enter the woods. I am disappointed to find that the forest's carpet of Scottish bluebells (Campanula rotundifolia) has not still not bloomed; alas, we are only one week too early. Still, the bluebell woods are quietly beautiful. We kneel down in the grass and see little purplish flowers coming up through the leaves and bracken. Walking a lap around the grove, we twice pass by the same woman walking her retriever. "Hello again!" she says cheerily to us, in an accent distinctly less Scottish than what we grew accustomed to further north.
Leaving the woods, we head south on another grass path through tilled fields, toward a farm building in the distance. As we pass the farm and complete our 2-mile loop along a pond (White Loch), a grey curtain of rain clouds sweeps toward us from the north, arriving in a sudden downpour. We don our Kennedy Space Center ponchos - finally of use for the first time since Iceland - and run back to Perth Road and across the highway. In our car, we head north to Blairgowrie proper, stopping at the local Tesco for the final grocery re-supply of the trip. After a backseat lunch of soup, pasta salad, clementines, and cheese danishes, we begin an afternoon drive through Perthshire toward our last destination - the capital city of Edinburgh.
We follow the A93 southward along the River Tay, awkwardly detouring to Scone Palace (a historic late Georgian house and grounds) before we realize the stiff per-person admission fee. Shamelessly, we turn the car around and drive back out to the highway. We continue through the city of Perth, eventually merging with the M90 to head south toward Edinburgh. Traffic builds as we pass over the Forth Road Bridge - one of two, soon to be three, adjacent bridges arching high over the Firth of Forth. ("I AM CROSSING THE FIRTH OF FORTH FROM THE KINGDOM OF FIFE," I announce to Jane in a half-scream). We navigate east toward the capital, passing through the city center with its attendant Friday afternoon traffic and winding cobblestone streets.
Just north of the Waverly train station and on the edge of Edinburgh's New Town, we leave our car in the parking structure of the St. James Place shopping mall, and carry our bags down several flights of stairs to the city street. We check into our room for the next two nights at 27 York Place, a brownstone townhouse converted into a bed-and-breakfast. Edinburgh, for obvious reasons, was the hardest place for me to find affordable accommodations during the planning phase of the trip, but the room is surprisingly spacious and the furnishings comfortable. We take a brief break before heading out around 5 PM for our final hike of the trip - a climb to the top of Arthur's Seat to look over the capital city at sunset.
We walk along Princes Street and then Regent Road, passing under the monuments on Calton Hill - proud spires flanking what looks very much like a half-built Parthenon, a tribute to Scottish lives lost during the Napoleonic Wars. Descending a steep flight of stone stairs, we pass through a cemetery and emerge onto Calton Road. We skirt the Scottish Parliament Building and Holyrood Palace to reach the trailhead at the foot of the Salisbury Crags, a palisade of basalt cliffs left untouched by a glacier that swept through this range two million years ago. There is a procession of hikers climbing the steep path along the crags - brightly colored specks on the against the igneous rock - but we opt to follow the trail of the glacier. We head north for a few hundred yards before turning east, walking up a ridge along the rim of an extinct volcanic caldera, its slopes overgrown with grass and brilliant, golden gorse. At the top of the caldera, we begin a final rocky climb to the top of Arthur's Seat. From the summit, there are panoramic views in all directions: the entire city of Edinburgh to the west, the Firth of Forth to the north and east, and the rolling lowlands and the snow-topped Pentland Hills to the south. A police helicopter, flying routes over the city, buzzes nervously close to us on the mountaintop before disappearing. We watch the sun drop toward the horizon before descending the volcano and returning to the city and grabbing dinner at a Chinese noodle bar on Princes Street.
