Go west!

New Year's Eve.  Spent driving from Glasgow to Inverness and then back to Oban for the night.  We finally encountered some weather on the road between Fort William and Oban and I was desperately hoping it would snow.  But not yet I'm afraid.  Finally saw a fellow kiwi too.  In the fish and chip shop in Oban.  He was from Dunedin.  Not sure where his mate was from but he was a kiwi too.

We saw some sights too.  Loch Ness, no monster though, and Culloden.  Scene of the battle.  It was very bleak out there today and also quite a solemn spot.  I was pleased that it was a memorial and nothing had been built on it.  Also went through Glencoe.  The scenery there is amazing.  It was like the desert road but better.  More mountains, more tussock, more scree etc etc.  Saw some of the locks used to traverse the lochs.  Quite an interesting system for getting vessels across land to the other side.  Some of the other lochs we saw were Loch Linnhe, Loch Lochy, Loch Leven and Loch Lomond.

A cool weather picture I took.  Quite proud of this one.

One of the Bens of Glencoe

Urquhardt Castle on the shores of Loch Ness

Culloden

Weather seems to have dominated today.  There was a lot of evidence of flooding though, to be fair, some of the flooding 'evidence' was pure speculation on our part.  It looked like the trees were growing out of the water so we thought that was some pretty strong evidence.  It was also interesting watching the outside temperature gauge in the car.  At one point it got up to a quite balmy 5 degrees!  It never went below 0.5 degrees so that was quite good.

We were also joking about seeing Prince William as we kept seeing a helicopter flying over.  After watching the news, and probably a big stretch but it's my story and I'm going to stick with it, we would like to believe it was Charles and Camilla who popped in to the Cairngorms for a visit.

One of the other things I discovered while looking through the local 'What to do in Oban' publication was that Duart Castle, ancestral home of Clan Maclean was just over the water.  Unfortunately Scotland is closed on New Year's day.  Maybe next time.

Off to Stirling tomorrow and I'll post some pics once I get some decent internet.  Have to run down two flights of stairs and make sure I am holding my mouth right to get it!

And this guy