This part of our journey is designated as the castle exploration phase. Potentially three days of inspecting some of Scotland's myriad castles.
We travelled to the car rental headquarters to pick up our car, only to discover that our special order for any vehicle but a station wagon had seemingly been ignored. This was made worse by the fact that the luggage screen was broken which voided our travel insurance had somebody broken into the vehicle. After some discussion with the manager, it turns out that it was a language issue where small estate wagons are very definitely classified as cars - they had taken the request to mean that we didn't want a SUV. Apparently what we needed was a saloon car! After some time we managed to secure a hatchback which was able to accommodate our luggage and we took off in search of the castles.
We decided that we would call in and visit an extremely attractive village named Dunkeld but about 10 miles from there the rain started. Rain is not really the correct description. Teeming is probably too weak as well. It poured. The desicion to continue to Aberdeen was easily made but the rain simply didn't stop. It was our introduction to the perils of touring Scotland. Rain in some form of another seems to be a constant here.
Scotland, like much of the UK is full of castles of varying sizes, shapes and repair. The area around Aberdeen is known as the Castle Trail and for good reason as there are quite a few there They can be privately owned or they can be in the care of organisations such as the National Trust Scotland. Either ownership does not seem to matter to the hordes of people who visit them, including the busloads of tourists or schoolchildren. I swear that some of those thousands of people l saw at Edinburgh Castle l then saw at some of the other castles. We also discovered that some castles are closed on week days which seemed a bit odd and a little galling when you drove down a lane and found the thing shut.
We did take the time to drop in to see Lizzie and Phil at Balmoral but they must have heard we were coming because they were not home. I do understand why they love to go there though, because the countryside is stunning. Whilst you understandably cannot enter the castle proper, other than the ballroom, you can wander the grounds and gardens at leisure and that alone was worth the drive. However after calling in at 8 castles over the 3 days, we were castled out.....
Next stop is Inverness and Loch Ness.
