Europe 2006: Scotland, Scotland, Scotland

Should have written it seven times as that is how many nights we spent in Scotland. I really enjoyed myself in Scotland, mainly because I expected rain and cold and it was warm and dry!. On our way north we stopped off for a feed at a Moto, about five o'clock, somewhere near the Carlisle. As we got out of the car, it became obvious there was a problem here. The whole place smelt like someone had just removed a poohey nappy. We charged into the eatery in the hope that the smell was an outdoors one - but no it was in there as well. Urgh. We then headed for Glasgow, as we wanted to get to the West Coast of Scotland. We were late getting into Glasgow, so we thought we had better stay a night rather than pushing on. Rang Visit Scotland and we were told that there were a lot of concerts on over the next two nights and that accommodation was hard to come by. We ended up at the Lyndhurst Hotel in Johnstone, a western suburb of Glasgow. This has a superb bar and restaurant, the room was large enough to swing two or three cats in. We ate Haggis Wontons in the bar, believe me they were nice. MLR ordered them and we all shared them, except, AJR who is a veggo. J had his first Scottish whiskey of the trip, this proved a daily activity. The next day we drove through the centre of town and then headed out to a large shopping complex near Johnstone. Here the kids got to ice skate on a rink in the shopping centre. I rang Visit Scotland again looking for something near Oban. We eventually got a place at Connell about five miles from Oban. We were just glad of the accommodation. The accommodation was opposite Loch Etvie. The room was very small, in fact once we put the camp bed up for AJR, we could not stand up in the room.

That night we went to McTavishes theatre restaurant. MLR sang and danced the night away on the dance floor. They had a floor show with a guy playing bagpipes, a fiddle player and an accordion player. A woman sang some traditional Scottish songs and a young girl came on three times performing traditional Scottish dancing. MLR got her own round of applause at the end of the night. The guy at the next table was very nice and we got into a conversation about where his sister lived in Victoria, Australia and the fact that he originally came from Fife.

At 10.30pm we took photo's of the sunset over Loch Etvie.