Celebrating Themeless Discontinuity: Attack of the Jellyfish!

So today we brought our wet, mucky, midge-filled vacation to an end. It rained all night, and while our tent help up wonderfully as per usual, I did get eaten alive last night and am covered with perhaps hundreds of little itchy painful bites. I hate midgies.

But the mornings prove to be resiliently beautiful, so I can’t stay mad at the island while we pack up, and there is something delightful about seeing al the dead midgies that drowned in the water that collected in the upturned dish of my Frisbee. We get everything together and head out, planning to stop at the Brodick Castle before catching the ferry back to the mainland. The morning is warm and sunny, and there are some great woolen thunderheads peaking up around the sandstone walls of the fortress. It’s apparently still lived in, and the upkeep proves it. It’s surrounded by acres of beautiful gardens, which used to be free but now cost a pretty pence, though not as pretty as then pence needed to actually get IN to the castle. It’s a 12th century thing, give to the Lords of Hamilton in the early 1500s. But we spend time putzing around, catching a glimpse of a homely but apparently truly romantic Bavarian pine cottage, complete with the original fir cone roof built in 1845. It was built by one of the Lords of Hamilton for his wife, who missed Germany. I guess everybody has to like SOMETHING quirky and ugly. Most importantly, we spent time playing on the very fancy kids’ playground. It was irresistible, with multiple 2-story slides, which Jonmikel just had to try, soliciting advice from Dads in the area saying, “Oh tell him to watch his head (CLUNK as Jonmikel hits his head) and, “Oh he needs to watch his ankles going around those curves!” There was also what looked to me like a child’s ropes course, with al kind of ups and down and monkey bars and climbing and balancing thing that we could have spent hours on. With playgrounds like these, its no wonder British kids are smaller and in better shape than American kids!

We also stopped briefly at the Isle of Arran Brewery, just to look around and decide its too early for beer, before hiking back to the Arran Aromatics and Cheese Shop, where we wasted time waiting for the bus to the dock.

The best story of the day, though, involved a group of pre-teen boys at the dock. It looked like they had been there waaaay too long (the ferry was running late) and they were incredibly bored. One of them had gone off to buy some (what I though at first were) firecrackers. They actually turned out to be some kind of fun chemistry experiment that I’m sure my dad would have gotten a kick out of. They were little bags about the size of a pack of baseball cards, and when you broke the stuff inside, chemicals mixed and created gas, which expanded the bag until it burst loudly and with enough oomph to impress the kiddies. So at first they were throwing them at each other, and then, upon deciding that it was not nearly cool enough, went off to find things to try to explode. Like a beached (and most assuredly dead, for all you animal rights activists) jellyfish. They boys gathered around and spent a good 20 minutes trying to cautiously lift up the gelatinous beast, place a bag underneath it, and run away. But they were all kind of pansies, and none would get too close to the jellyfish, so they mostly missed. Eventually, though, they got one, and it exploded just as this boy, who had been relegated to “just watching” by his buddies for committing a party foul and moving an exploding bag just before it did its damage, was running up to needlessly adjust it in hopes of regaining status. With a dramatic **pop**, the thing exploded, a chunk landing right on the kids arm. Apparently, those things still sting post mortem, and the kid was covered in prickly goo. His friends though it was so hilarious, that he was returned his status on principle, though he had to remain the butt of every jellyfish joke for the next hour and a half on the ferry. If you had to spend time waiting for a late ferry, watching kids explode jellyfish on each other with things way more creative and safer than firecrackers, then this was the way to do it.