Tour of Scotland -- Sept 2011

[OC Richard]

Gosh, you will need another holiday after all that!

Yes indeed we have a saying "I'll need a vacation to recover from my vacation."

Many Americans take frantic, overly-busy vacations because they're trying to pack as much stuff as possible into less than two weeks.

This tour reminds me somewhat of the trip my wife and I took back in 1986:
We flew into Manchester, hired a car, drove up to York (the museum, the Shambles, etc) then to Jedburgh, the Culloden site, Edinburgh (visiting a pipemaker), Perth, Blairgowrie, Pitlochry (vising The House of Edgar and having lunch with Blair McNaughton and his charming wife), Inverness (where we visited the sporran maker Alexander Robertson near Kiltarlity), Loch Ness/Urquhart Caslte, Eileen Donan Castle, Isle of Skye (back when you had to take the ferry), Boreraig, Dunvegan Castle, Oban, Fort William, Kintyre, Arran, Kilmarnock, Glasgow, then down to the Roman Wall, Chester, driving about northern Wales, Llanfair etc etc, down to Stonehenge before returning to Manchester to fly out.

In ten days.

We did a similarly crazy trip in 2004 where we took in stuff we had missed like Cornwall, Portsmouth's Naval Museum, the World Pipe Band Championships in Glasgow, etc.

Doing that much driving probably sounds crazy to a Brit, but the whole of Britain is probably the size of California, and we Californians don't mind driving.

We were having breakfast at the B&B near Chester back then in 1986 and the charming landlady asked us what we were going to see that day. She was astonished when we said Stonehenge. It was completely inconceivable to her that someone would drive that far as a day trip. To us it was nothing.

I am glad to see that the tour is taking you further north than Inverness, the large chunk of land above it, in my humble opinion, is the best part of Scotland and is so often ignored.

Yes we too didn't go above Inverness. We had intended to go up to John O Groats but we didn't have time for everything.