Scotland

We spent a fantastic week in Scotland, visiting family and tormenting the locals with our broad Aussie accent.

Edinburgh was in the grip of Festival madness and it felt like half the world was in town. Of course, we did a trawl through Edinburgh Castle... and the city. 

After that, the memory of what days we went places is already fading... so the rest is probably an at least slightly fictional account of where we went when.  The places are real though.. hehe.

We had a fantastic visit to Stirling Castle (can never have too many castle visits) with its amazing tapestry workshop .   We went for a walk through Stirling town as well, and there was some usual passive-aggressive humour from locals, building monuments that poke fun at the people in the castle. In Stirling, it is the Puggy..... sitting with its butt facing the ones on the hill. We also went through the amazing house of the Keeper of Stirling Castle... incredible that it had survived being used as a backpackers in the '70's and '80's.

Next stop Roslyn Chapel... yep.. the one Dan Brown had in the Da Vinci Code.... single handedly responsible for both the damage from crazy people trying to dig up "hidden" things... and for the restoration now underway enabled by the tourist entry fees.  The chapel doesn't allow photography inside, so all the photos are of the other bits. 

We also went for a trip to New Lanark in the beautiful Clyde Valley, an example of 19th century social experimentation attempting to improve the lives of the poor. In this case, the poor were the mill workers, including kiddies. The way New Lanarck was organised, the kids actually got schooling and the population got health care, and housing, etc. A couple of kms down the road was a small collection of houses called Kirkfieldbank, one of which one set of ancestors lived in.... but there isn't any information as to which one...bugger.

These had all been practice runs for being willingly kidnapped by the sis and taken on a 6hr drive to Inverness, via Fort William, and heading past the infamous Loch Ness (didn't stop) and through the equally infamous Glen Coe.  One of the places we stopped at on the way was Blair Atholl, a very funky castle.  We stayed at a beautiful and completely eccentric 17th century guest house just north of Inverness at a place called Muir of Ord. 

At the end of the week it was time to say bye bye to my lovely sis and family... and to my lovely kiddie as she headed back to La France... while I hopped the Leprechaun Express and skeddadled to sunny downtown Ireland.