April 4 & 5: A failed attempt at camping & Medieval music!
I love the Falkirk Wheel!
We’re currently in Cupar, which is a bit of
a tiny, nothing town just near St Andrews.
We’re staying with an unbelieveably sweet family we found on AirBnB and
they couldn’t be more different from Fergus.
They invited us to have dinner with them (making us a veggie risotto
with some wild Scottish herbs and wild garlic.
It was incredibly tasty) and they set us up in what used to be servants
quarters in the house. It’s well kitted
out with scented candles and a variety of teas.
Needless to say, they’ll get top marks when we have to review them.
Nicholas in awe of the Falkirk Wheel
The past couple of days have been
hectic. Yesterday morning, Nicholas went
and picked up our hire car, which we got from a small company called Celtic
Legend. The guy we emailed with was
actually, genuinely, 100% called William Wallace. He signed his emails “Willie”. We swung by the UK version of Walmart to pick
up a whole heap of non-perishables and probably 8kg of bananas, before we started
heading to our first stop: The Falkirk Wheel.
Not to rain on Nicholas’ Falkirk Wheel
parade, but I wasn’t wholly excited about the whole rotating wheel thing. It was pretty cool when we actually got
there. It replaces about 11 locks, which
used to take 8 hours or so to go through.
It takes 4 minutes and uses the amount of power to boil 6 kettles. “How?” you’re probably asking (maybe you’re
not. I wasn’t until I saw the informative video). Inertia.
For that reason, given Archimedes role in the hole ‘inertia’ thing, the
little travel boat we went up the wheel in was called The Archimedes. We sat behind a pair of really annoying
children who got the best spots in the boat.
That part was annoying. Nicholas almost
wet himself with engineer-based excitement.
I hate to see what’ll happen at Legoland.
We hung around at the Falkirk wheel for a
while. I admired all the dogs, who were
much better behaved than the children.
Nicholas watched the Falkirk Wheel in amazement and took lots of videos,
so he could relive the experience again and again. I joked that he should’ve worn his GoPro on
the 50 minute boat journey up the wheel, through the tunnel and back down the
wheel, and he got a glint in his eye like he thought it was a good idea. I shouldn’t joke about such things.
Nicholas pretending to go in for a passionate kiss with one of the Kelpies
They had installed some lights to light up the Kelpies at night but some foliage was growing in the way. Foliage is so cool.
After we’d finished at the Falkirk Wheel
(read: I convinced Nicholas that instead of deliberating over which Falkirk
Wheel postcard to buy, he should just buy them both and get going) we headed to
the Kelpies. The Kelpies are huge. There’s not a lot else to say about
them. We didn’t do a tour because we had
to pay too much for parking. We ate
cheap cup noodles while everybody else ate really expensive ice cream.
The Kelpies!
We stopped at a really beautiful look out on the way to our camp spot.
From The Kelpies we needed to find
somewhere to camp. We had plenty of time
before sunset to find one. Scotland has
much more relaxed camping laws than Australia and we’d read the code, so felt
pretty well equipped. We found one spot
that looked promising, but kept driving to a loch we’d seen on a map because we
thought that’d be much more picturesque.
It was. We set up camp and were
just about to roll out our mats when some rangers told us to move on because it
was a reservoir and human excrement and all that. Not 2 minutes after they left and we were
pulling out pegs, the sky darkened and we saw the sun dip behind a
mountain. Not promising.
We decided just to head to the previous
spot we had seen. It was a bog.
Driving off the mountain and down to
Kilsyth we started having a look online for motels. Looking for a motel at 8.45pm on a Saturday
night on a long weekend in a tourist town isn’t promising. On probably the 7th place we
called, we got a winner. It could’ve
been the 6th place, which was the Antonine Inn. On bookings.com the most recent review was 1
star, proclaiming “THE STAFF WERE AGGRESSIVE.” Nicholas and I had a good chuckle
to this, thinking they’d have a bad experience.
When we called the inn to enquire about the booking, the receptionist
very abruptly said, “We don’t take bookings over the phone. You’ll need to go to bookings online.” They really were quite aggressive.
We stayed up far too late watching the Da
Vinci Code and looking at places we had been on our trip, like Rosslyn Chapel.
The Wallace Monument (looking quite foreboding in the fog)
Today we got up relatively early to make
use of the free breakfast included in our hotel stay. All that haggis and blood pudding in the bain
marie really puts one off their mushrooms and beans, to be honest. Only in Scotland.
Ignoring the fog, we set out for the
Wallace Monument, jumping some fences to cut across the roads. It was also really foggy and already filled
with tourists. We decided against
paying the fee to go up the monument, considering how foggy it was. You’d hardly see anything from the top.
I'm loving all the daffodils.
Such mist. Very monument.
Nicholas using The Wallace Monument as the backdrop for his prog rock album cover. He thinks he looks like he's air guitaring. I think he looks like a terrible tango dancer.
Did I mention I love daffodils? Did I mention there was fog?
We were also keen to get to Stirling
Castle. To celebrate Easter long
weekend, Stirling Castle had been turned into something of a Renaissance fair,
with falconry and 16th century dancing and hurdy-gurdy playing. I was most excited for the dancing. Stirling Castle was pretty beautiful and the
weather turned out to be amazing. I even
managed to go a whole day without any thermals – just a t-shirt.
This owl was too tired to deal with the tourists at the falconry session.
These ladies were the height of fashion (once)
We watched some really cool displays and I made friends with an owl. We ran out of time to see everything at Stirling Castle, probably because I was too busy dancing with ladies in wonderful dresses, but that's ok. There was a fat man playing all kinds of strange and wonderful instruments. He directed us to his YouTube channel and says he also does weddings. I'll keep it in mind if I ever get married in Scotland. https://www.youtube.com/user/JimTribble/videos
Nicholas is a jester and I'm somebody dressed like a Flemish painter
Stirling Castle (the front view was obscured by an ice cream truck, so you get this one instead)
We walked around and tried on costumes and
lazed around in the sun and eventually headed to the lovely house in Cupar
where we are now. Nicholas is watching
James Bond: Skyfall and looking at Glen Coe, where we will be in about a
month. I’m looking at our pictures and
not watching Outlander, even though I’d like to be. Tomorrow night we actually DO camp, so wish
us luck!
We also drove past a town called Dollar so we stopped to take a picture with the Dollar Sign, because we're tourists.
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