WEDNESDAY 30th MAY 2012

NORTHWARD TO SCOTLAND

After a great nights sleep in our very comfy bed, we had a hotel breakfast (again included in the room rate) packed up the Audi and headed north!
The great food and the daily pints are starting to mean extra kilos around the mid-riff! Gonna be a lot of hard work necessary on our return to Oz!
The fifteen or twenty miles of driving to reach the end of the Lakes District National Park was just as beautiful as on the way up! More lakes, more steep hills and miles of stone walls and picturesque valleys! It really is one of the most amazing places to visit and an absolute must if you ate visiting the UK!
We wound our way through countryside and into Scotland till we reached Gretna Green, where apparently during the war, lots of couples wanting to take advantage of Scotland's more liberal age restrictions on marriage, came to elope and tie the knot!
All the tourist buses stop here and we found it awfully tacky and cheap! There was even a fake wedding for all the tourists to photograph! Ugh! It was a grotty spot! We grabbed a drink and then hit the Motorway and headed for Loch Lomond, bypassing Glasgow and several other big towns before reaching the Loch. Very picturesque again and a very big lake but nowhere near as pretty as Windermere, so we took some photos and started to look for a hotel to stay at! Unfortunately there weren't many about and so we decided to push eastwards to Perth and stay there! It took a couple of hours of negotiating the narrow winding "A" roads, but we saw all sorts of crops being grown, including potatoes, cereals, strawberries and berries.
By the time we reached Perth our tremendous run of fine weather had finally run out and we had light drizzle for quite a way! We got to Perth after 5pm and found a Best Western Hotel and booked in, another old but very comfortable place with a bar and lovely old dining room which we used later in the evening!
Well today we covered a large distance and finally got to Scotland - saw a Loch, not Loch Ness unfortunately, because it was still a long way north of here and time won't permit us getting there!
We are all feeling a bit tired tonight! Have packed so much into the fortnight we have been here and although Den and I both enjoy driving, it does get tiring after a while, especially on the motorways where the speeds are high and the traffic very heavy. The lesser roads are much easier to drive, but it takes ages to get anywhere!