Into The Scottish Highlands

We had a great room in Edinburgh. The photo above gives an idea of the size of everything! There was space to burn!

We left Edinburgh and made our way to St Andrews the home of Golf. It is a pretty stark sort of a place, especially when there was a gusty cold wind blowing. Just beside the golf course was the beach on which they filmed the opening scenes from "Chariots Of Fire". This turned out to be be the best beach we would see during our 6 weeks away! This was a good spot to grab some souvenir gifts for friends back home.

We moved on to have lunch in a small town called Dunkeld. It was a truly pretty spot and soup and roll at the local Pub did us nicely. Then we walked around the town and found this pretty river. This sort of travel was hugely different to what we were to experience in Europe on our later tour. This tour had plenty of worthwhile stops, the Europe Tour was more to cover plenty of kilometres!

A small fully hand operated distillery was our next stop, the best part was the 'free sample'! From here we moved down to the Central Scotland town of Pitlochry where we were 'left' to explore while the others went onto visit Blair Castle. Blair Castle was an 'extra' which required extra payment. We thought it ABC (Another Bloody Castle) so opted not to go.

Our walk around this gorgeous town was exquisite, to a beautiful river (photo on the left) and finally a pleasant cool beer in the front beer garden of McKay's Pub seen below. It was extremely pleasant in the afternoon sunshine. Trish Joined me for a cider!


The bus collected us, we rejoined the group and headed into the Scottish Highlands. Though the weather had improved a little, these chilling looking mountains did not warm us up at all, especially seeing snow on the peaks in the distance. There was not a tree to be seen. Nor did we see a town for most of the rest of the day's travel. It was quite eerie really.

After a great meal and entertainment overnight we were on our way south again heading for England's Lakeland district. This was a travelling day but with a few stops along the way. The first stop was beside a huge loch to photograph this majestic Scottish Castle. It was very impressive.