Today we begin our Highland Adventure. First a walk downtown to rent a car, reserved ahead of time and ready. Then we parked by the flat, gathered our gear, and took Chase to her kennel for the weekend. A bewildering drive through the southern part of Glasgow was interesting. However, our navigation system which we rented with the car was invaluable. We named the sat nav voice Emma. It sounds like such a proper British name for a proper British voice. Anyway, Emma would tell us enter a roundabout, take the second exit onto E892, etc. etc. Sometimes Emma would admonish the driver for not staying on the highlighted route. Other times she would tell us that she was recalculating, which was a nice way of telling us to get back to the highlighted route. The car was a little two door Astra with the steering wheel on the right side like all the cars in this country.
With Chase settled, we took a brief excursion to Airdrie---Neil's father’s birthplace, another town with old buildings and so on. The economy of the last few decades has not been kind to the area. We saw the downtown and headed for the next destination Falkirk. The Falkirk wheel is a modern project to revitalize canal traffic in Scotland. See the pictures. It connects a cross country canal with a canal to Edinburgh and is one way to deal with the elevation change without the use of the traditional locks. We, Nancy and I, took a boat on the wheel—Pete and Jess were excluded by capacity of the boat. We had a funny tour guide/captain/crewmember who asked if anyone was scared of heights, Nancy raised her hand, and his response was she should have done a wee bit more research before boarding. The journey up the 67 meters was gentle but high. Then we stopped, the gate opened and we pushed out of the bucket and into the canal for a ride through the tunnel to a turning basin—here boats continuing would go through another lock before continuing to Edinburgh. The original plan was to make the wheel even higher and eliminate the extra lock, but as the ancient Roman Antonine Wall crosses the site and could not be disturbed the plan was altered to tunnel under the wall and then make up the distance with a single additional lock. We turned around and came back down while we tried to take pictures of Pete and Jess as they climbed the hill and walked alongside the boat. Once we were we together we had a snack and returned to the car.
The third stop was the Firth of Forth Bridge---a massive steel cantilever railroad bridge. We drove across the carriage way bridge which was also awesome and high down to the parking area of North Queensbridge. These bridges are high enough for ocean going vessels to travel under. We walked around and were actually able to walk under the approach to the big bridge—very cool and very windy. Back into the car for a drive up the coast to St. Andrews.
At St Andrews we had a quick panni at a local shop, and Jess made a contact for her job about going green and helping the shop owner with his efforts in that direction. We walked around the town, stopped at a Bakery/sweet shop for some lovely chocolate truffles and caramel coated shortbread. We took our pictures by the Russell hotel, and walked down toward the beach. The beach was pretty, an arc of clean sand and gentle surf, but very cold water. The museum of golf was closed—an indication of how late it was getting. The golf course was getting ready for “the” open so there were grandstands under construction and lots of temporary buildings. We were able to walk on part of the course take a picture or two and then up the hill to the car and on to our stop for the evening—Aberdeen.
We checked into a nice Holiday Inn Express, parked the car in the car park, the clerk warned us not to leave the car on the street, and set out in search of dinner. We found a number of loud pubs and full restaurants, with waits of an hour or more. Jess found an almost deserted Coffee House that said it was indeed open, and they did have food. We had lovely sandwiches in a quiet clean atmosphere. The owner was an entrepreneur trying to save money and was converting his halogen lamps to LEDs. The LED lamps fit the same socket as the halogen but only used 3 watts of energy, and they were very bright and cool (temperature). What a great idea. We walked back down the street to the hotel and had a pint at the bar as Ghana lost the series of free kicks to Holland. And so to bed, and sleep, or at least that was what we anticipated.
Steps: 16,070
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