Our Grand Tour of Scotland: 2010

The blog has been very quiet recently, but there's a good reason for this - we have been on a grand tour of Scotland and have only just returned home.  It was a holiday of highs and lows, but most of all it was fun.  Oh, and we were visiting the grumpy old man and the nice lady from Stirling, which was lovely, but the nice lady fed us too much tablet and fruit pudding, so we are now fat little teddies and one chunky chimp with a muffin top above his kilt!

Ok, so what happened, what did we see, and where did we go?  Well, Bev had made a long list of places to visit on our grand tour and the ones we did see were:

• Ben Cruachan, which has a hydro-electric power station inside the mountain and you can get a guided tour of part of the station
• The Titan Crane in Clydebank, one of only 14 left in the world.  A lift takes you 150ft up to the viewing platform, from where you get wonderful views up the Clyde River and over Clydebank.
• Oban - for some reason the nice lady had an obsession about visiting Oban, and when we went there it was much prettier than Bev had remembered it and we got great views from McCaig's Folly
• The Highland Wildlife Park at Kincraig, where you can see Scottish Wildcats and their new kitten
• Summerlea Industrial Heritage in Airdrie, which is a brilliant industrial museum, with its own coal mine and a working tram
• The Silver Sands of Morar - looks like the Caribbean but the water is only just above freezing!
• Rannoch Station, Loch Tummel and Fortingall with its thatched cottages and 5000 year old Yew tree
• Loch Goil and Carrick Castle
• Loch Lomond and Luss and the Trossachs
• Glencoe and Glen Etive
• Charles Rennie Mackintosh house for the Blackie family at Helensburgh (Hill House)

Loch Lomond and Ben Lomond from Luss.