Saturday 1 September - Day 11 - Best of Britain Coach tour continues

Left the hotel fairly late this morning - 9am - because we didn't have a long way to drive today.
Our tour director is a former actor and a fairly accomplished pianist, and since the hotel lobby had a piano we got a small impromptu concert before we left.
First stop was Stirling Castle - we spent a couple of hours there and needless to say it had already started raining by the time we got there  :-)
The castle is seriously impressive - it's built high on an extinct volcano (just as is Edinburgh Castle actually) at the first place where an invading army could easily cross the River Forth.  It's a brilliant spot for a castle - you can see miles in all directions - but even so it has been besieged quite a few times (at least 16 times, Wikepedia tells me), and some of those sieges were successful.

 Above is the Great Hall - it has been carefully rebuilt to show what it would have been like originally - apparently the colour is quite authentic.

An example of the work they've done inside the royal palace part of the castle - this is in the Queen's bedchamber.

 It must have been quite a challenge to besiege a place like this!

 View of the town looking down over one of the many guns.

Paul outside of the great hall - as you can see there aren't many other tourists, but this had changed fairly dramatically by the time we left.


After we left the castle we drove a few miles up the road to a small town called Callendar.  It's a tourist town - people go there during the summer to be close to the lochs and mountains - so there were plenty of places to get food and a few things to see.  On the way there, we saw the castle that was used for Camelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail!
Next part of the trip was a drive through the Trossachs (literally it means something like 'wild bristly place') - sort of the introduction to the Highlands but not so hard to get to.  We also saw Loch Lomond.

 View across Loch Lomond - it was a pity about the clouds and mist because it would have been even more beautiful in the sunshine I'd think.

 Paul has bought his second new hat - this time a tam in the Stirling Tartan.

 Random view across the Trossachs - but if you click and enlarge it you might be able to see the wind farm in the distance.  Unlike home, they don't save the wind farms for only the ugly / already spoiled places here.

Another view of the Trossachs.

Final part of the trip was into Glasgow.  By the time we got here it was quite miserable with rain, and although we went out for a little walk it didn't last long; we just came back inside and ordered room service.  Most of the hotels we've stayed in so far have been in the city centre but this one isn't; apparently it's too hard to get to the real city centre hotels here.  So instead, our hotel is in an old dockyards area that has gradually been converted to a business area - lots of office buildings and some hotels, a couple of restaurants, but no shopping facilities.  Just up the road there's a new arena going up - the Scottish National Arena - which is going to be a venue for the 2014 Commonwealth Games.  We took a couple of pictures around the area:

 Conference centre - I wonder where they got the inspiration for the shape???

 Another conference centre, I think.  Paul dubbed this one the silver haggis; not a bad name but to me it just looks like a big slug.  Not an attractive building at all.

 Bridge across the Clyde.

This crane doesn't work any more- it has been left here as a sort of memorial of the huge amount of ship-building and other heavy industry that used to happen in this area.