I’m on holiday – yay!

As a result, writing posts will take a back seat to the glorious views and rich history of Scotland for a few days – hope you will enjoy the ride.

This year, instead of breaking our journey up from the UK south coast to the farmhouse above Inverness with just one day of sightseeing, I thought it might be nice to take a bit of a tour up – what a great idea! We set off with a 4 days tour in mind, and turned it into 5 days.

Day one involves leaving England! It’s about 300 miles up to Cumbria, and about 350 to Scotland, which takes roughly 7 hours on the motorways, complete with traffic jams and accidents. We’ve stayed at the Buccleuch Arms Hotel in Moffat several times before (hotels have to be dog friendly – Frodo insists!) but its been many years since I visited the nearby waterfall – The Grey Mare’s Tail

I fully admit, we didn’t take the scramble up to get a closer shot, as I wasn’t certain we had the time, but it’s still beautiful, even from this distance.

And these are the views in either direction from the car park

With our holiday mindset fully engaged from this beginning, we set off North!

Our route took us through Glasgow and up to the edge of Loch Lomond (see pictures from last year here), and then left, towards the West Coast and Oban. This road travels past the Faslane Naval Base, home of the Trident nuclear submarines, and a very important part of World War 2. Now, it means driving past acres of barbed wire, so no photo ops here.

Then it’s on to the REST AND BE THANKFUL – a stretch of road notorious for being closed more often by landslips than any other road in the UK. Fortunately for us, it was open!

Think this looks innocuous? Take a good look at the chain links holding the hillside above the road together…

REST AND BE THANKFUL are the words inscribed on a stone by the roadside, placed there by soldiers who built the original military road in 1753. It gained the name because the climb out of Glen Croe is so long and steep at the end that it was traditional for travellers to rest at the top, and be thankful for having reached the highest point.

Then it was on through Inverary, past the iconic castle

And find your way through the interesting town roads

Our next stop was at the fascinating Cruachan reversible Hydro-Electric scheme inside a hollowed out mountain. You can read more about it here, but for security they don’t allow photography, so nothing to add from me.

With about an hour of daylight left, we finished the trip to Oban, and found a delightfully sandy beach for Frodo to run about on:

The view which Frodo is admiring is the outline of The Isle of Skye, where we will soon be headed.

There were still some enthusiastic beach-goers, despite the lateness of both the day and the season.

Looking back towards the town

And across the water and the busy shipping lane, this time to the Isle of Mull

Finally, back to Oban itself with its interesting version of the Coliseum

And our hotel for the night – ‘The Falls of Lora’ hotel

Next stop – The Isle of Skye