| St. Andrews | Edinburgh |
SouthWestern Highlands of Scotland June 16, 2003
| Monday morning we finally got the entire tour
together. Our tour guide picked up another 16 people at the train
station, then came to the hotel to pick us up.
The picture to the right shows the bus, our driver and our guide. It was a 44 passenger bus (so reasonable seat spacing) with only 25 of us on board, so enough room to stretch out (or jump to the other side of the coach for a really good looking photo. |
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The first stop was on the banks of Loch Lomond at a 5 star
hotel called the Cameron House.
As you can see, a very neat looking older home that they have converted into a hotel (massive extensions behind the portion you see on the left). |
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| The Loch lived up to it's reputation for being a very beautiful place (plus we got very non-Scottish weather. They served us morning coffee there, then gave us time to walk around and break in our cameras. |  |
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Very shortly after leaving Loch Lomond, we were in the highlands. Some of these hills in the highlands are as much as 3000' high (not these) so they tend to call them their Scottish Alps. They are mostly rocky with grass, heather and moss covering. They are popular for climbing, but actually quite dangerous as it is almost always slippery and much of the stone is screed (and thus nothing to fasten too). One of the more popular climbing spots (see Glen Coe) actually had a helicopter landing spot reserved they used it so much. |
| We finally stopped for a break (not lunch yet, even if it was 12:30) at Inverary on Loch Long. The town was built to support the "help" at the nearby Inverary Castle, so wasn't much to look at (very good housing, just not built for beauty. But, as you can see, the Loch is beautiful. |  |
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The Inverary Castle is really a "picture perfect" opportunity. So I walked back from the town (about 1/2 mile) and got a picture while Marnie showed James around the town and bought us a beverage to take back on the bus. |
| We did finally stop for lunch in the town of Oban and had an extensive time to walk around as well. There was an harbor to the left of this photo and a hill that you could climb a set of stairs to the right of the photo. Really neat place and worth the wait. |  |
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To finish off the day, we took a drive up Glen Coe. The road is narrow and twisty, so when we passed another coach coming down, life got interesting, but Donnie did well. Here's the spot where people really like to climb (the people are standing on the helicopter landing spot). |
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We drove down the hill to a little hotel called Ballachulish (that's
also what the town was called, but we didn't see much there except the
hotel).
We had dinner in the dinning room shown to the left (but we ate at tables set for 8, not for 4) |
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Right across the street from the hotel is Loch Leven. After dinner, I walked across the street and took this picture to the West. As you can see, the weather is still not very Scottish, we had sunshine and warm weather all day. (That will be remedied tomorrow). |
| St. Andrews | Edinburgh |
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