Road tripping with Jane and Big Bertha

The Kelpies

Falkirk Wheel

Stirling Castle

Stirling Castle

Stirling Castle

Stirling Castle, amazing tapestries

Stirling Castle, new friend

Stirling Castle, I missed the dress up room,
but eagle eyed Jane found it

Old GA headquarters

If you see this car, move over

The day has arrived to be daring, hop in a car and head north. Our car is ready and its time to load up and go. Press start / stop, turn handbrake off, car rolls, hmm, try again, and again, ask the nice man to help me and not laugh, he tells me to do, what I have been doing. A few more times and viola we are off onto the streets of Scotland. Watch out world. The GPS is built in, nice, leather seats, nice. But the car is so big we ordered a small Hyundai and ended up with a beast, now dubbed Big Bertha. Maybe they saw all our luggage and decided we needed the extra space.

Jane is in charge of GPS, postcode does not work, location does not work, lets go the closest suburb and guess from there. Make it onto the main road and through a roundabout, phew, at least the car is easy to drive. 

The first stop on today's tour is the Kelpies, a beautiful sculpture of two 30m high horse heads. Impressive and gorgeous against the deep blue sky, snap, snap. Say hello to some dogs and moving on. Second stop is Falkirk Wheel, quite an engineering marvel, the wheel replaces 11 locks and moves boats between two canals 35 meters in the air. Even more impressive.

Ok, Big Bertha, that was two easy bits of navigation, let's try to get into the city of Sterling and capture the castle. Right to the top, the car park full sign is out, but there is nowhere to turn around so we end up at the gate and get directed by 4 separate attendants to our parking space and I even reverse in. Right now time for some fun, up the ramp and in we go, first glance is a garden how beautiful against the stone of the castle I like this place. Now we keep going, Grand Hall fully refurbished and can fit 500 people they must have had some big parties back here once upon a time. Onto the palace rooms and these are even nicer, with fully restored or new tapestries. I really like this castle, gives me a real sense of how it must have been in the past. The surrounding town is really well laid out and the houses look so well cared for, an all-round nice place,

There’s time for one more tourist attraction, National Wallace Monument to pay homage to William Wallace (think Mel Gibson in Braveheart) and see his actual sword. Thankfully there is a shuttle bus to the top of the mountain and then we ‘just’ have to do the 246 steps in the narrow staircase to the top. The most interesting bit has to be the story of the 72 robbery.

Now its time to head for our base for the night, Perth. We have one more pilgrimage to make back in the dim dark recesses of time we had a great band of people who all worked together at NZI. Then along came an organisation called General Accident and their headquarters were in Perth, Scotland. Well, they broke up our happy band of workers and so I am here to throw a rock at the window. Well not really. But I could never understand why they had a headquarters in the back blocks of Scotland on top of a hill that looked like a nuclear fallout bunker, so armed with some insider information (thanks, Mark) we made it. Nowadays it is an Aviva management training centre and not the grandiose head office of the past.

A quick pizza, a walk around Perth and there are people enjoying this hot weather and even jet skiing on the River Tay. Now its time for some zzzzzzzz.