Hits and misses

Today is one of two days this week that we do not have a big event scheduled, so this was a day to be tourists in our region of Perthshire.

We heard that the town of Falkirk had a couple of good attractions so we set the GPS for that directions and, though we had a few glitches in the directions, we made it to the Falkirk Wheel--an amazing engineering achievement that allows for boats to be lifted up from one lower canal to a higher one so that it's possible to complete an east to west boat crossing across Scotland. The wheel is liike a giant Ferris Wheel that carries two boats at a time--each suspended in a giant tub of water. Really amazing to watch from the bottom, and, though we didn't do it, you can take a boat into the wheel to see what it's like to try it out.

Next, we wanted to see The Kelpies, a pair of 90-foot tall steel sculptures of horse heads, but the GPS refused to cooperate and kept taking us past them on the highway instead of getting us off on the right exit. We gave up in frustration after a few wrong turns. Strike one.

We set off to see Stirling Castle, which is one of the most visited tourist attractions in all of Scotland. We got to the parking lot at the top of the hill only to find that they had to close the castle (in fact, all of the historic district of the town) to tourists as there was a major water main issue and no way to provide toilets, etc for the thousands of travelers there today. Strike two.

So, we headed over to the William Wallace national monument near the site of his great battle in 1297. Wallace was the warrior in the movie Braveheart, which I want to watch at some point. We arrived and paid our admission, but soon realized that every level of the museum was up about 100 narrow spiral steps in the tower--with people climbing up and down at the same time. Joe and Patty wouldn't go up at all, while Don and I made it to the first level. The exhibit there was good, but it was not worth it to us to make two more steep climbs to see the rest. Strike three.

We passed through a cute town called Bridge of Allan and found a nice, cozy pub called the Westermore Arms and had a very pleasant lunch there. 

Then, we decided it was time to try a wee dram of whisky, so we went to the ancient Glenturret Distillery for The Famous Grouse Experience. See next blog.