Scotland

Day 3 - Stirling to Oban - Saturday, 31 August, 2024 Weather - Fine - 19ºc max. Accommodation - Glenroy Guesthouse, Oban We spent the majority of the day in Stirling before setting off for the 2.5hrs drive to Oban. We walked up the hill to Stirling Castle just after the opening at 9.30am and the place was already heaving with tourists. We opted for a tour of the castle with a local Scottish guide who was both highly amusing and informative. She managed to keep all forty of us interested for an hour as we walked the length and the breadth of the fortified castle. The story behind the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries in the Queen’s Presence Chamber was a fascinating one. The fifteenth century originals are held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. A team of weavers researched the medieval weaving techniques, colour palettes and materials to reproduce four of the large tapestries. It took ten years and 12 million pounds to complete the project in 2015. The vibrant, ric...

  Day Two - Manchester, England to Stirling, Scotland - Friday, 30 August, 2024   Weather: Fine - 19º max. Accommodation: Hotel Colessio, Stirling We woke early and needed to decide where our next destination would be so we could get closer to catch the ferry to the Isle of Skye on Monday. We settled on Stirling as I’ve never visited this small historical city and Henk had only visited it briefly about forty years ago. It was to be a four hour drive and a good choice.  With Henk’s navigation and with the help of Google Maps it was an easy drive out of Manchester despite the peak hour traffic, some spaghetti loops and junctions and many roundabouts to eventually get onto the busy M61 and then the M6 to Scotland. The speed for the entire journey was 70mph (110kms) and all cars seemed to stay at this speed and the traffic moved well. We passed many exit signs to places where we had walked through on either the Coast to Coast walk or our Land’s End to John O’Groats wa...

  Day One - Manchester - 29 August, 2024   Weather: Fine - 18º max. Accommodation: StayCity Apartments, Manchester After the long journey from Brisbane and a good night’s sleep we woke early to a fine day in Manchester. This was our settling-in day before heading to NW Scotland, our destination for the majority of our holiday. The city was still waking up at 7.45am when we walked the streets getting our bearings.  Thankfully, many cafes were open for a choice of breakfast venues. We then had jobs to do to prepare for our journey north - getting our communications sorted, picking up our hire car and some grocery shopping.  We decided that as we only had one day in Manchester, and we have been several times before over many years, we wouldn’t race around like headless chickens trying to see everything. We settled on visiting the Manchester Art Gallery which was a ten minute walk from our accommodation through the city centre and its parks. It was well worth the v...