Thanks for coming back to more tales of Scotland. If you read my last post Welcome to Edinburgh, you will see that where we last left off, we had just slept in a wonderful little cottage and awoke ready for adventures.
I neglected to share this family picture taken the morning that we left the little cottage. I thought that you might enjoy it, so I am including it here.
“Now I’m rested and I’m ready to begin” -The Avett Brothers in “February Seven”
The music of The Avett Brothers became the soundtrack for our trip. We listened to it most days in the rental car. The boys still ask to hear certain songs now that we are home.
After leaving our cottage in Fife, we had to stop for electricity to power our electric car.
Many of the charging stations in Scotland are at cafes, garden stores and grocery stores. Scotland has a lot of gardening stores! Also, the gardening stores all seem to have a clothing section and a café, which is cool. I enjoyed browsing them.
I know that I said something about this in the last post, but we ended up spending a lot of time charging areas. Electric cars are great. However, we learned that if you are taking a trip with a lot of driving, like we were, you might spend a lot of time charging your car on that trip.
On this day, we were able to change our car at a very nice Starbucks location with outdoor seating. This picture was taken on August 7th but the weather that day felt like a beautiful 60 degree day in Pennsylvania. I feel like we are going to experience autumn twice this year. Once in Scotland and once now that we are back home.
We prepared for this trip by talking to our friends who have visited Scotland before. One family was an especially big help because they have traveled to Scotland several times in the past few years. We will call them the Barrelmakers. They live in our town and were very generous in sharing their Scotland knowledge before the trip. They guided us by showing us pictures and telling us stories of things that they had seen on their previous trips.
They guided us towards getting a Historic Scotland 14 Day Explorer Pass, which allowed us to see several castles and historical sites for less money than we would have paid to see them individually.
We also met up with the Barrelmakers while they were also on vacation. We arrived in Scotland first. I will write about the adventures that we had with our friends in future posts.
Outside of our friends, we gained knowledge about things that we wanted to see in Scotland by reading Rick Steves books which I borrowed and bought to take with us.
We also watched a video together on a rainy Monday night that I borrowed from the library that included all of Rick Steves Scotland episodes. This family viewing proved to be very useful because it allowed the boys to have some opinions about what we saw and what we might see in Scotland.
The town of Pitlochry, our destination that day, was a Rick Steves suggestion. The historic market town sits on the River Tummel and is the gateway to the Scottish Highlands. It is located on the eastern side of Scotland.
Pitlochry is famous for among other things, its dam and fish ladder. Yes, fish ladder!
Fish have to get through dam someway, right?
You can read about the Pitlochry Fish Ladder here.
Despite how non-interesting a dam and fish ladder sound, we were very charmed by Victorian, historic and cute Pitlochry. We enjoyed its Victorian architecture and river scenery. What really hooked us though, I think, was the fact that it had an adventurous playground on the front lawn of its playhouse, like theatre playhouse. Like they knew that children would be nearby and would want to play on a playground and not act stuffy and uptight.
Here are some sights from when we walked into town.
We stopped for icecream at Scotch Corner and Mr. Katie and I sampled Scotch flavored ice cream while the boys had something blue flavored.
We also visited this waterfall, Black Spout Waterfall on our way out of town. It is 190 feet high.
After we left Pitlochry, we began our 2.5 hour trek to the Highlands were we would be staying near the town of Inverness for the next two nights.
I will share more soon about our time in the Scottish Highlands.
See you soon!
