Rob's Euro Trip: Lochs, Pheasants, Scots, and Hamish

   So I guess this will be the first official post that relates to an actual Euro trip!! This past weekend I went to Scotland for Friday-Sunday, so get your cup of coffee, tea, or beer and get ready to read!
The trip started off by meeting up at King's Cross Station at 9:30 am on Friday where we all loaded the train for our roughly 6 hour train ride to Edinburgh, our first Scottish city on the trip. There was a mix of seats facing forwards and backwards, since the train heads both directions. Every now and then there was also a table with seats on both sides, so of course I grabbed a table with the 3 other people in my building that were on the trip. Added bonus my seat was facing the opposite way the train was headed, very odd feeling! Anyways the trip up England and into Edinburgh was filled with gorgeous country side and small, quaint towns seated right next to the ocean! There are plenty of pictures on my Facebook (I took over 400 for the weekend) if you want to look at them.

   We arrived in Edinburgh at about 4:00pm and after checking into our hostel we set our stuff down then darted up to Edinburgh castle. Sadly though we arrived 2 mins late to catch the last tour of the castle! So instead we took pictures outside then went into this place called the 'Woolen Mill" which was a HUGE shop that made Tartans (kilts) and had any and every typical Scottish thing you could think of. I was fully planning on buying an authentic kilt uuunnntttilllll I looked at the price tag. About 40 pounds to make a kilt that was custom to you, which is about $60. While it would have been awesome to have an authentic kilt made in Scotland... $60 is a bit too steep! Anyways after touring that shop we went around to the rest of the city real quick before we had dinner. We ate at a local pub where I order smoked salmon on top of mash potatoes with a prawn lemon sauce...... Delicious! I was going to order Haggis which is a Scotland traditional dish but I wanted to wait until we were in the highlands to get it from a small town that made it really well! After dinner we had to meet back at the hostel at 7pm to go on a haunted tour of Edinburgh. The tour took us around what is called the "Royal Mile" which was the main strip back in the middle ages. We basically went around St. Giles Cathedral and the building of the Scottish Parliament building. after that we went down into the part of the city that they walled up and put everyone that had the bubonic plague in to quarantine the city. These vaults supposedly were haunted and there have been a number of encounters on the tours. While nothing happened on our tour it was kinda spooky and a sad story about how people were basically walled up and left to die. After the tour we were on our own, so me and the other people I was with went to a couple of the pubs where there were tons of Welsh people because of the Scotland vs Wales rugby game the next day.

   The next morning we had to be up and on the coach bus by 8:45 am where we had our own tour guide for the weekend. He is a blue badge tour guide, which basically means he knows anything and everything about Scotland. He was really fun and very interesting. Our final destination on Saturday was to end up in a town called Oban. But throughout the day we stopped at sights such as Loch Awe, Loch Airy, Loch Lomond, Inverary, Kilchurn Castle, and Crianlarich. These were all up in the Highlands of Scotland and were simply breath taking sights!!! Oban was a nice fishing village that had plenty to offer. It has a natural harbor protected by a group of small islands right at the mouth of the port. It was also a very hilly area where at the top of the highest hill that overlooked the entire city they built a short, wide tower that was built solely to help fight unemployment a long time ago. We got to the top right at sunset so we got to look out at the city right at dusk, a gorgeous sight! After this we went back to the hostel that we checked into previously to take a nap since it had been a very, very long day. Once we woke up we went to go get dinner then to some pubs. But that night was an early night cause we had been in a coach for about 9 hours with intermittent stops and had to be up at 8:45 am again.

   Sunday we did a little bit of back tracking but the main sight of Sunday was Stirling Castle in Callendar. We got a tour of the castle from our awesome tour guide Gavin Hunter who did by the way wear an authentic kilt allllllll weekend. We also saw Perth and Doone Castle (where Monty Python was filmed and at the entrance they have a pair of coconuts you can click together). But second best to the Castle was stopping and seeing Hamish. I've added a picture to show who Hamish is, but he was definitely the highlight of the weekend! After the Castle and Hamish we headed back to Edinburgh train station to catch our train back to London. A fun little event that happened on our ride back home, about 4 stops away from our final station there was engineering work and signal failures making it so that only 1 rail line was open. So this meant we were delayed an hour and a half and ended up arriving at the station two and a half hours late. That wasn't really the best way to end the weekend but we might be getting compensated the price of the return ticket soooo that is a bonus!!

Dochart Falls