Vincent Chiravalle (right), President of the Rotary Club of Los Alamos,and Lisa Schutt, 2018-19 Rotary Youth Exchange Student from Switzerland exchange club banners Tuesday at the Club’s weekly meeting at Cottonwood on th Greens.  Schutt is from Maeinfeld, a very small town near the Austrian border known for its pinot noir grapes and as the setting of Johanna Spyri’s beloved novel, Heidi. Photo by Linda Hull

Scotsman and LANL physicist Malcolm Burns regaled a crowded Rotary Club meeting Tuesday with tales of his “bizarre, surreal experience” to craft a boat from a bathtub in order to row across Loch Lomond as a fundraiser for Alzheimer Scotland.  The event, Papa’s Bathtub Row, honored Robin Graham, the beloved grandfather of Burns’s wife.  In an engaging presentation, Burns describedthe painstaking efforts to build a test model in New Mexico to pilot on Cochiti and Abiquiu lakes before replicating the model in Scotland.  Stories included a pirate attack and a rubber duck. Burns raised $4000 for Alzheimer Scotland in a two-day row that required more than 15 hours of rowing at an average of just over one mile per hour, depending upon the wind and waves.  Burns commented he could’ve biked the 22-mile distance in one-and-a-half hours, walked it in 7 hours, or swam it in 14 hours.  The water temperature was 54 degrees. Photo by Linda Hull