Glamis Castle and Loch Lomond

I spent the rest of the week traveling with my family: we went to Glamis Castle on Thursday while the kids were in school so we didn't have to worry about the gruesome details that a castle tour sometimes includes. This time, we weren't disappointed: we learned about the ghost that is bricked up in the salon wall, supposedly engaged in an eternal game of poker with the devil himself, and the white lady who sits in the very back-row chair in the chapel of the castle who is the ghost of Lady Janet Douglas, burned at the stake at Edinburgh Castle by James V. We also saw Duncan's Hall, which the tour guide explained was the "setting" of the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, even though the room was built 400 years after the actual murder took place, and the actual murder took place in Elgin. Despite the gore and the historical discrepancies, the tour was excellent. The Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was born and spent her childhood here, and there is a royal suite that her family used on visits to Scotland that was lovely to see. I also liked the small powder room off the drawing room, used by servants to repowder men's wigs, reapply waxy makeup to pockmarked skin, and remove maggots from the ladies' elaborate, yet rarely washed or combed out, hairstyles. Glamis Castle also has a good cafe built into their Victorian kitchen, a carriage house with various exhibits (this one was on royal weddings through the years, of course!) and beautiful gardens, where the four of us spent a few hours taking photos of flowers and Highland cows, and sipping from the bottle of Bruadar that Ted bought in the gift shop. Bruadar is a whisky liqueur made from malt whisky, honey and sloeberries, and it's quite sweet--in fact, my mother even took a pull from the bottle and didn't hate it! I have a photo to prove it, but will preserve her dignity by not posting it...

On Friday, we visited the first tee at the Old Course, and walked around in some of the golf shops (my mother is the golfer and enjoyed this very much, and the three of us were successful in suppressing our yawns as we headed into yet another pro shop!)

We had lunch at a chippy in town, then my mother and I went to Greyfriars Primary School to help with Emma's Friday activity group. My mother was shocked that, when we arrived and went to the computer classroom where the activity was to take place, all of the kids were sitting calmly, doing the activity that they were supposed to, without a teacher in the room. I was working with a boy named Johny in P2 (first grade) on a program that helped him with decimals, and she was impressed that they were so advanced, and so well behaved. I think that's because she used to teach first grade! After school, we went to West Sands beach to take a photo of all of us with St. Andrews in the background. The best photo is below, all the way at the end, and I won't mention how many tries it took to take it!

On Saturday, we woke up to dreary, persistent rain, with more in the forecast, but packed up the car anyway and headed west. Amy and Ted and my mother had all their suitcases with them for the return flight home on Monday, so it made for quite a cozy ride! Our first stop was Doune Castle, built in the 14th century by the Duke of Albany. It's unusual for a Scottish castle in that it was all built at one time, rather than section by section through various centuries, and has

remained relatively unchanged since. Like almost all other Scottish castles, though, it did host Mary Queen of Scots on a few occasions (I was actually impressed during our visit to Aberdour Castle early on in the week to learn that MQS never stayed at that castle, and if I were management there, I would definitely play that up: Come to Aberdour for a unique visit to the ONLY castle in Scotland without a Mary Queen of Scots bedchamber!). Doune Castle is not as well-known for any of these things, however, but for something that happened there in 1974: Monty Python and the Holy Grail was filmed there. That fact alone must account for about 80% of visits made to Doune. In fact, the free audio guide that is distributed at the ticket till is narrated by Terry Jones of the Monty Python comedy team. In each room, he presents a straight-forward account of the various activities that might have taken place there, then says at the end of each section, "press the green button for more about the Monty Python scenes that were filmed here." This was endlessly fascinating to Emma and John, who had never seen the movies but who still very much appreciated the taunts of a French soldier to King Arthur: "I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hampster and your father stank of elderberries!"

As we left Doune and drove into Callander for lunch, the rain became torrential, and though we successfully ducked into a cafe for some lunch, our afternoon plans of shopping in the quaint high street then hiking in the nearby Queen Elizabeth State Forest were pretty much dashed. We made a quick stop into the David Marshall Lodge Visitor Center, where we glanced at a live feed of an osprey sitting on an egg, and where a Scottish forester who was sitting in the corner

monitoring the feed and eating his lunch pointed a candy bar at me and, with a mouth full of food and in a thick Scottish accent, said "Moor bhurg vahnrandy ist seedum then, nae?" I nodded and giggled, and ushered the kids out of there as soon as possible, before he finished chewing!

We drove on to Loch Lomond, where we checked in our hostel for the night. We were staying at the Auchendennan House, which was built on the site of a hunting lodge owned by Robert the Bruce. The current building was built between 1842-46 by a Glaswegian merchant and features a ballroom and a huge cast-iron staircase, despite it being used during World War II as housing for an anti-aircraft division of the British army, and after the war being turned into a hostel. The views out of our room were spectacular, though we were looking at Loch Lomond through the driving rain. After setting in, we drove to Loch Lomond Shores for dinner at the Kilted Skirlie, which was

delicious despite being in the middle of a poorly-conceived touristy shopping mall. But since it was raining, we had very little other options. My post-dinner itinerary of driving north to a pub called the Drover's Inn that features traditional live Scottish music on Saturday night was also squashed because of the rain, so instead we took a quick drive through the next-door, high-end Cameron House Hotel to count the Bentleys and Aston Martins in the parking lot (which was gravel...who drives an Aston Martin onto a gravel parking lot!?) then returned to the hostel for an early night.

On Sunday, the rain continued so our options were very limited. In fact, since we didn't have enough room in the car to bring breakfast with us, and since even the touristy shopping mall on the shores of Loch Lomond didn't open until 10, we had to do the unthinkable: go to a McDonald's for breakfast! It's the first McDonald's I had seen in Scotland (giving you an idea of the kind of place we were visiting...), and probably the first one I had been in for over a year. But, coffee is coffee, and I had been awake for three hours already without having had any. So, desperate times call for...

We padded around Loch Lomond a bit and did some shopping in the end, then stopped in the town of Balloch for lunch. The pub we chose had a good menu of Sunday roasts, and while we were eating, the rain stopped and the sun came out, at last! So we packed up the car and headed towards Glasgow, where Amy, Ted and my mother were going to stay in an airport hotel for the flight home this morning. We stopped at Dumbarton Castle on the way, which is built between two huge volcanic rocks on the Firth of Clyde overlooking the city. Not much is left of the castle now, though you can still climb all the way to the top along the castle walls and visit the prison and the gunpowder magazine. John was the only one of us brave enough to go all the way to the top, though it was so windy and he had on a windbreaker that was puffed out like a sail that I was afraid he was just going to be blown off into the Firth of Clyde, so I couldn't watch! We toured all the nooks and crannies of the castle, stopped to watch some men playing bocce ball on a groomed courtyard near the river, then drove into Glasgow to drop off my family at the hotel and then to begin the 90 minute drive "home" to St. Andrews, where we all went to bed early!