Greetings From Scotland

HOTLNC

HOTLNC

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Well, now we in Northern Scotland. We flew into London from Ireland and caught an air bus to Edinburgh. From there it was a 100 mile drive to our time share. We are close to Inverness (I hope I'm spelling it right.) The Tom-Tom does not have the street marked for the resort. The resort is an alpine area in the Scottish Highlands. You can still see snow on the mountaintops on the northern sides. There is not enough to ski. I figure it is about 5-10C degrees cooler here than in Ireland and maybe the season is about two to three weeks behind.

Here is the Log and Lat in degrees:
N 57 Deg 10.546 Minutes
W 3 Deg 48.420 Minutes
Maybe it shows up on Goggle Earth.

More later as we explore. I'm searching the net for the Harry Potter Castles. If they are close (within 100 miles) we'll visit.
 
Lots of Castles in Scotland, the one from the movie Highlander is up that way.
My cousin lives in Glasgow, if you get into any trouble over there or need help in finding places to go let me know. Or maybe you need someone to translate something into American English lol. I can shoot him and email or give him a call.
 
We’re driving a 2.0L Ford Mondeo. It is suppose to be a full sized car. It only had 3200 miles on it when we picked it up at the airport. It runs fairly well, but you have to gear it up to highway speeds. You can’t leave it in fifth gear and go pedal to the metal and expect to achieve 70MPH. 60 is about all you will get. Here in Scotland, you can go 70MPH when the highway is divided and 60MPH when not. The roads are wider and better maintained than Ireland. It has a slight ricer-sounding exhaust that is distracting.

We could not get to the Harry Potter castles, as most were in England and the only one in Scotland was too far (about 200 miles south of us.) The “Hogwarts” train and the long viaduct bridge shown in HP III are nearby and on the train tour. But you can’t get rides on the train until after the middle of May. So we missed that.

Today we went around Loch Ness. We took the “country road” on the east of the lake. This road was about 36 miles long and single lane with plenty of “passing places.” Then we went back up the west side of the lake on mostly highways. We toured Urquhart castle on the trip and were not able to take a picture of the Monster. I guess we didn’t drink enough malt whiskey, or we’d of seen her. We did check out the Loch Ness Information Center.

The above was yesterday, as I did not have internet access. I'll report on today later on.
 
4/28/09
Today we traveled south to Stirling. This city is just west of Edinburgh. The trip was 113 miles on mostly 60MPH two lane roads. It took us about two and a half hours. The Tom-tom had predicted 2 hours and 10 minutes, but due to slow trucks and one construction site, we didn’t make it that fast.

We bought gas just before entering the city. Fuel was 0.959 Pounds per liter. The exchange rate was 1.6 dollars per pound so that makes it $1.53 per liter, which is $6.95 a gallon! The Ford got just over 30 MPG.

We toured part of Stirling Castle. We also toured Arguill’s Lodgings, which was right next door to the castle. The inside the lodging was furnished like the palace of the castle. This was important as the palace was closed for restorations and will not open until 2011. It was here that we learned of a typical servant’s wages: a loaf of bread and two pints of beer. A Scottish pint is about a quart! Everybody made their own beer. Beer was good; water was deadly. You drank water and you died of Typhus (Typhoid fever.) So everybody drank beer. There were three levels of beer: High beer was very strong, poured like syrup and had lots of alcohol. High beer was served to Royalty and the knights. Medium beer was fed to the servants as wages. Small beer was fed to the kids and women. By the way, all of these beers were cloudy and the small beer had more alcohol than the beer we can buy at the bar!

Royalty typically ate on pewter plates; servants on wooden. Since pewter is made of tin and lead, the lead leached into the king’s blood and given the high percentage of alcohol in his high beer, he was far down the road to insanity. Lead poisoning explains a lot to me about English and Scottish history.

Next we went to the Wallace monument. William Wallace’s (Braveheart) monument is this huge tower on a hill across the city from the palace/castle. There are 246 steps leading up past four levels of the tower. The wife and I started it but the knees gave out and we never got to the first level. We let Daughter #1 (Nikki) do the entire trip. As a reward, I bought her a refrigerator magnet button that states “I climbed the 246 steps!” She looked kind of flush when she came back down.
 
Sounds really interesting.
I'm bloody half English have family around London. I know some of them did not get along years ago.
I have visited a castle around Cornwall and also one in South Ukraine where some world leaders (Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt) have held summits.
I think Castles are very interesting kind of an eary feeling knowing what happened back then ! Pictures when you get back ?
Cheers
 
William Wallace "Braveheart" is a distant relation of mine...Mom's maiden name was Wallace.... somewhere around here I have the Family Tree that shows it.....

Somewhere down the line the spelling of the name was changed from WALLIS - early to mid 1700's.

I should really attempt to get over there sometime....
 
Scotland is great! (I spent 3 months living in the outskirts of Edinburgh) Gonna take the wife there for a few days in the summer!

I see you initially flew into London. Hope you didn't come in through Heathrow - what a horrible, horrible airport! Lol.

I was in England over Xmas just gone - had a 2008 Ford Mondeo 1.8. station wagon. Awful car! Gutless with a raspy exhaust. This time when I go back, I'm going to insist on a turbo diesel!
 
I have been to those places on my visit. People were not to happy when the statue of William Wallace looked way to close to Mel Gibson.
 
Sounds like you're having fun!

I've spent a lot of time in England but never Scotland.

That beer you're talking about sounds like ale. Is it hand pumped from the cellar like in England? I love that stuff.

Have you ridden a steam train there yet? A friend of mine and I would drive to historical Railways and go for rides all the time. I love that stuff too.:D
 
Yeah, we squeezed in a steam train ride, Bill. What surprised me was you could feel the stroke of the piston as it pulled the train.

4/29
Today we drove about 84 miles to visit Castle Dunrobin. There are over 190 rooms in the castle and we had a walking tour of a lot of them. This castle (palace?) was a hunting lodge at one time, a WWI hospital at another and is the current residence of the Countess Sutherland. She wasn’t in.

While there, we got to witness a falconry demonstration “in the garden.” The falconer used falcons, eagles and owls. The demonstration was very, very impressive. He told us stories of the local neighbors letting their dogs come onto the grounds. If the eagles are out at the same time, the dog is invited to lunch and is the main course. The several hunting birds are only a small portion of all the birds they care for. The hunting birds can keep themselves and the sick or lame fellow birds well fed with freshly killed game.

4/30/09
Today we mostly took it easy and didn’t get out and about. We stayed within 20 miles of the resort. Nikki signed up to go on a horseback ride. They had highland ponies. Not small horses – the one she rode was 15.5 hands (hand = 4 inches). While Nikki was blazing her English saddle, the wife and I visited a 17 century working village. They had a working waterwheel driven saw mill. They also had three thatched roof homes. The beds looked like cup boards. They bring the cattle in adjacent barns in November and leave them there until May. They use the warmth all winter.

After we linked back up, we went to a local sheep farm where they gave a demonstration of sheepdogs. They used border collies, exclusively. That was neat watching the dogs work the sheep. They responded by voice and whistle commands. They train the dogs starting when they are five weeks old and use ducks. They can’t train them that small on sheep because the sheep will bowl them over and they will be scared of sheep the rest of their life – ruined as a sheep dog.

Tomorrow we will be checking out a day early to prevent having to drive to the air port for a Saturday flight at dark thirty. On our way to Edinburgh, we’ll stop in Perth and check out the Scone Castle. From there we’ll go on to Edinburgh Castle. Typically the castles close at 1600, so we’ll drag our carcasses to the air port hotel and I’ll return the Ford.

Speaking of which, I have not found how you open the hood! There is NO inside pull to pop the hood. I’ll try again after awhile and see if I missed anything.
 
They don't call it a hood, it is a bonnet over there, that is why you are having trouble. :D And it is not a trunk, it is a boot. The bonnet probably opens from the front of the car like the old days here.
 
steve said:
They don't call it a hood, it is a bonnet over there, that is why you are having trouble. :D And it is not a trunk, it is a boot. The bonnet probably opens from the front of the car like the old days here.
Click to expand...

You are quite right. However, there is no bonnet lever either.

Also I noticed this Ford has electric automatic open and close features. I guess the automatic close feature was sued out of USA Fords.
 
What I meant to say was grille emblem! Lol. (flip it, insert key and turn, then find the usual secondary latch under the hood)

MondeoHoodRelease002.jpg
 
Yeah, I found that pic from Dereck on another board - and that was the reason for it being posted - the silliness! Lol.

I think Ford saw the error of their ways, as my 2008 rental didn't have those instructions. :)
 
Yeah, I found the leaver that opened the hood (bonnet). It was on the other side of the car -- not under the steering wheel.

More later. We're back in the states and I'm draging. It's also storming.
 
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