The Lady Of The Lake and The Man Of The Sword

Friday's first stop was Loch Katrine, inspiration for Sir Walter Scott's poem,The Lady Of The Lake. To get there I drove along the most winding road imaginable. It wasn't even called a road, it was called a pass. My satnav took us to a car park at the foot of Ben Venue and told me we had arrived. So I asked a Scotsman in walking gear if he knew where Loch Katrine was. He grumpily replied that he didn't know and said he was trying to climb Ben Venue but had ended up walking round in circles and hoped somebody would rescue him before midnight. That did not inspire confidence. Thankfully, Anni has a better sense of direction than I do and we turned out to be only just around the corner. Having lunched in the cafe and listened to a man playing the Ballamory theme tune on bagpipes,we boarded the Lady Of The Lake for a one hour cruise.

It was really lovely. We have been so blessed with the weather. The tour guide asked us all to point our cameras upwards to the left to capture something very rarely seen in Scotland...the sun. At the edge of Loch Katrine we had a lovely view of the Arrochar Alps.

 From there we drove on to Stirling to visit the Wallace Monument, where I climbed the 246 steps to the top. Annabel declined the last flight of 35 because she was nervous of being at the very top. There were lovely views.

Sadly the town was closing up as we went in and so we decided to drive out somewhere else to eat and found a lovely restaurant just outside the not so lovely Grangemouth and then killed some time at Blackness castle before collecting Peter from Edinburgh Airport. Now we are chillaxing in St Andrews at our very kind friends' beautiful caravan. Our friends Peter and Anne, were the only other people under the age of 80 in the church we went to when we were first married, when we lived in Driffield and they lived in Scarborough. We have been staying in their house with their daughter, Andrea and tomorrow we actually get to see them.