After touring the Oban Distillery, which I wrote about in my last post, we departed and set off for Gourock six days into our trip.
The final short-term rental that we stayed was located in Gourock, Scotland. A quiet coastal town 25 miles from Glasgow it sits along several waterwaterways including the Firth of Clyde and the River Clyde estuary. We stayed at this apartment for a week, which made it the longest leg of our trip.
We arrived in Gourock after driving several hours from Oban. Milage wise Oban and Gourock are only 84 miles apart but it took about five hours including stopping for lunch at St. Conan’s Kirk, an architecutrally important church and wading through traffic. Also the roads between the two towns are also pretty windy. Most of the roads are only two lane and there was some small tourist towns in-between with many cars that held up traffic.
Finally, we arrived in Gourock! We had a hard time finding parking near our building. The building we stayed is pictured below on the left. The picture on the right is the side-street directly across from our building. That street leads down to Cardwell Bay which you can almost see in the middle of the photo.
We arrived at our Gourock apartment on Tuesday afternoon. After having some off-site adventures on Wednesday through Friday, we finally had some time to relax and enjoy Gourock all day Saturday. We spent quite a bit of time at a park and playground which we walked to from our apartment.
In the photo on the left Nugget poses with a boat trailer with a familiar name. On the right, a photo of a sign with another familiar name from Mr. Katie’s family. We saw both on a very nice walk that we took with our friends the Barrelmans on our Saturday walking adventure.
What Was the Short-Term Rental Like? Did You Like It?
It took a little while for the short-term rental that we stayed at in Gourock to grow on me. The Oban apartment felt like the most touristy one that we stayed in. The Oban apartment was urbane and furnished a little bit like a hotel. For example, it has flourishes like brightly colored throw pillows and and a very attractive bathroom.
I was in love with our Oban apartment when we left it. While both short-term rentals were on the 4th floor of their buildings, they felt very different.
First, we had a hard time figuring out which building our apartment was in when we arrived in Gourock because some of the identifying numbers were missing. When we did find a parking spot and gain entrance to our building, there was a scary sounding dog barking from behind a door that we could hear from the barebones stairway leading to our apartment on the 4th floor. Our apartment was clean enough and had all the necessary items like beds (twin beds for all!), a kitchen, and a living room (really TV was the most important part for the boys). But it was plainly furnished, which I might not have noticed had we not just come from that place in Oban.
How Were You Feeling About Gourock at First?
I did not love that Gourock did not seem to be close to many of the things that we wanted to see during our visit to that side of the country. Before we left America, I had booked tickets to see Edinburgh Castle and Stirling Castle. A trip to Edinburgh Castle the two days after we arrived in Gourock showed me that Edinburgh was much further away than it looked on the map. The central belt of Scotland, which is the name of the region which includes Glasgow and Edinburgh, has some population density to put it mildly. We encountered a lot of traffic on our trip to Edinburgh.
Not long after arriving in Gourock, we had also made plans with our Coopersburg friends, the Barrelmakers, to travel to a different CalMac ferry port to travel to the Isle of Arran which is located off the western coast of Scotland. Our trip back to our apartment afterwards included a horrendous detour through which we felt like we saw half of Scotland.
We also planned on exploring Glasgow and Stirling while staying in Gourock.
In short, we had some plans for this leg of the trip and after a few days in Gourock, we were all starting to get tired of being in the car.
An Aside Comparing My Love of Oban to Wine in a 20+ Year Old Oscar Bait Movie
Have you ever seen the 2004 movie Sideways? It’s good, likeable maybe. Who knew the guy who played Lowell on the show Wings could do drama?
Do you remember the way that all the characters keep talking about wine? The characters were constantly going on about Pinot Noir, pinot this, pinot that.
They would not stop talking about pinot. That’s how I sound to myself when I talk to other people about Oban.
I sound like this: Oban had the best blah, blah, blah. . . I’m like: Thank you for telling me about your special thing that you really liked experiencing. It was just like that in Oban.
So in summation, ignore me. I was blinded by Oban.
I couldn’t see the jewel that was in front of me,
which was Gourock.
How I Learned to Quit Pining for Oban and Love Gourock and the Inverclyde Region
It took a few days, but Gourock grew on me too. I felt like while we were in Gourock, we were starting to see the real Scotland, not just the tourist Scotland. The building that we stayed in housed real Scots. We met one of the neighbors downstairs and had a hard time understanding his accent. We played in the local park and visited a used bookshop in town that supported a local hospice. We visited a coffee shop in town just off the park that seemed like a place for locals. We ate at a very nice restaurant overlooking the bay and we observed people meeting friends and celebrating birthdays. Our friends, the Barrelmans invited us to their flat for dinner, and we felt like we were among friends in Scotland.
One small little Gourock coincidence gained my notice last Saturday. I was at my library job, and I was looking for music CDs in the online catalog. I decided to look for the most recent CD for the band Blur because I am into listening to music on CDs right now. I couldn’t remember the title of the CD but I knew there was a song on it that I knew well. The song is called “The Narcissist”. Nugget was addicted to this song in the summer of 2023 when it was new. In fact, I wrote in blog in September of 2023, that it was “the banger of the season”. You can read that post here.
Anyway, I had to look up the title of the album that “The Narcissist” was included in on the internet. I remembered what the album cover looked like. The coverd had a swimming poool and a vacant lifeguard chair in the forefront and a lone swimmer in a large pool. Through the brief, brief search, I uncovered an interesting fact. The title of the album that I was looking for is The Ballad of Darren. The picture on The Ballad of Darren is of the outdoor swimming pool that overlooks the West Bay in in Gourock, Scotland! I had seen this album cover many times but never wondered where it was.
I had made plans on our itinerary to visit this pool on our trip but never put it together that when I saw the pool it might have been in a picture that I had seen many times before.
Gourock Outdoor Pool is a heated, outdoor, saltwater pool that is right next to the bay. Mr. Katie and I visited a similar pool (saltwater, bay adjacent) in Vancouver, BC many years ago and I wanted to experience that again.
The day that we were scheduled to visit Gourock Outdoor Pool was quite rainy, so we had to change our plans. Instead, we visited Inverclyde Leisure Complex Indoor Pool, with our friends, the Barrelmans, which had indoor waterslides and a lazy river and was also awesome. We had a great time there! I didn’t take any pictures of it though. I don’t know if I was allowed to use my phone inside the building. You can always click on the link if you want to see pictures of how it looked at the pool complex.
The only regret that I have is that we did not see the pool from the album cover that we have been looking at for three years, every time that we listen to “The Narcissist” on streaming platforms.
So yes, Gourock was great. My love for it was a slow burn. It wasn’t the instant kind of love that I had for Oban, but it might have burned stronger in the end.
In my next post, I hope ,to share some pictures from our trip to Edinburgh Castle and to talk about why visiting Edinburgh in August while everyone else is on vacation too, is maybe a bad idea.
