After a delish home-cooked breakfast of Eggs Benedict, we swing onto a bus that takes us to the National Museum of Scotland. It’s a bit like the Kelvingrove in Glasgow: a bit of everything under the sun … ooops, still precious little of that: why we’re inside again.

We begin at the beginning in the geology section in the basement level of the museum where we learn that the 30,000-square-mile place now called Scotland started out as a submerged continent near what is now the south pole. Yes … SOUTH pole … about three billion years ago when Precambrian and Cambrian deposits formed some of the oldest rocks on our planet. This continent, surfing a tectonic plate, collided later with another plate near today’s equator in an event named the Caledonian Orogeny. This is hot rock sex on a massive scale: Volcanoes erupt, magma flows, mountains as high as the Alps sprout … and the whole place continues to drift lazily northeast. Time passes and the earth’s sea level rises and falls: Scotland becomes a seabed some millennia, a desert at other times, and reverts to more hot rock sex when it feels frisky. Finally, North America and Europe divorce and separate, killing off all non-avian dinosaurs and leaving a necklace of volcanic sites along Scotland’s west coast, including the Isle of Skye. Someday, far in the future, scientists say, Scotland’s going to be the new North Pole, drifting about as fast as a fingernail grows.

We go up a flight and look at hats in the fashion court. None of them will keep the sun or rain off your head. They are the fanciful creations of … fanciful creators. One woman, whose father was a neuroscientist, made a hat like a skullcap with ganglia and synapses and exploding neurons sprouting out (see photo).

We see furniture and paintings and armor and airplanes and “The Maiden,” a guillotine used publicly to behead criminals and political opponents for about 150 years (1564-1710). And we see Dolly, the first mammal cloned from an adult’s body cell (from a mammary gland in a six-year-old sheep). 1996. My God, that seems forever ago. Other mammals previously had been cloned, as early as 1984, but what made Dolly special was that she was cloned from a non-embryonic cell, which nobody had thought was possible. One small step for ovines; one large step for science fiction movies.

We take a longish walk to the Sheraton Hotel’s One Square Bar, which serves more than 150 different gins, carefully divided on the drinks menu into London Dry Gin, Dry Gin, New Wave Gin, Cask Age Gin, Old Tom Gin, Sloe Gin, and Flavoured Gin & Gin Liquers. There was nothing we did not like.

We walked the incredibly hilly three miles back to our guest house … NOT! Uber. Good night.