Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois by Gardner R. Dozois

name), served plain, without even powdered sugar on it, the dough itself not even remotely sweet—it tastes mostly like cold congealed grease.
    Back at the dock, the harbor-cruise ship has arrived, and we file on board. Swans have formed a queue in the water alongside the ship, and are begging the tourists for food, and I regret not bringing the largely-uneaten remnants of my “battery” back for them; perhaps, as Scottish birds, they would appreciate it more than I did. One little girl is teasing a swan by pretending to be about to feed it a potato chip (sorry, crisp!), getting it to arch its neck up excitedly, and then snatching the chip away from it at the last moment—after a few minutes of this, the swan gives up and swims away in disgust. The drizzle has largely stopped by the time we set out, which makes the trip more pleasant, but I don’t expect that we’re going to see much except for the scenery of the Firth itself (a not-inconsiderable attraction in its own right, of course), and that turns out to be true (I become suspicious when they offer us the tour tickets at a considerable discount; whenever they offer something to tourists during tourist season for less money than it says they’re going to charge you for it, something’s wrong—in this case, I suspect, they know that we’re too late in the year to really have a good chance of seeing a lot of wildlife). During our hour-long cruise, we see exactly one—count ‘em, one—dolphin, which we dutifully watch for the minute or so that it’s visible above the surface of the water. Still, it’s a pleasant cruise on Moray Firth, enjoyable for its own sake, just for the pleasure of being out on the water in the open air in a small boat. By the time we get back to Inverness, the skies have cleared, and the sun is out.
    Drive down the A82 to Drumnadrochit, along the shores of Loch Ness. It’s a bright day by now, the narrow waters of Loch Ness sparkling with sunlight and whitecaps, and I’m amused to see that the road alongside the loch is lined with people hopefully watching the loch with binoculars, waiting for the Monster to show up. I do exactly the same thing for a few minutes (without success, alas!), then we continue to Drumnadrochit—which consists mostly of a couple of hotels and gift shops and The Official Loch Ness Monster Center, which has a big plaster statue of Nessie outside—and on out the other side of town to Polmaily House, our next inn. This turns out to be a nicely rambling old wooden house, not as pretty or imposing as Fallowfields; the room is nice, although a bit smaller and not quite as elegant as our room at Fallowfields; the bathroom is considerably larger and more conveniently arranged than at Fallowfields, though, where we had a toilet and shower set in one tiny closet-sized cubicle and the sink all the way on the other side of the room, tucked away in a cabinet. And the grounds are about as extensive, or perhaps even more extensive, with tables set out under a nice expanse of tree-shaded lawn that leads over to the swimming pool, and grazing horses visible in the field below, before the ground climbs up to the hill on the other side of the road.
    We drop our luggage in our room (which is hot, so we open all the windows . . . which turns out to be a fateful decision) and drive back through Drumnadrochit to the ruins of Urquhart Castle on the shores of Loch Ness, the castle they always show in movies that have a Loch Ness locale. We’re both so tired by this point that we end up driving on the wrong side of the road for more than a mile before either of us notices! Fortunately, the road that leads to the inn is not a heavily trafficked road, so we manage to get away with it. Perhaps we’re a bit too tired to really enjoy the castle, either, probably we should have just stayed at the inn, but we buy our tickets and dutifully trudge down the hill to tour it, with only a few groans about how steep the hill is going to be coming