What an incredibly good first day of the holiday. My family deposited me and heavy suitcase in the bus station at Bromsgrove and the coach turned up some ten minutes late. I was joined by my North American friend and then we set off, calling to a service station where we had a change of driver and an early morning cup of coffee. Then we experienced a very amusing and well-informed coach driver who stopped us at a service station well into the journey where my friend and I had an all-day breakfast. We happened to be sitting at a counter where there was a motor cyclist sitting opposite to us with the words ‘Shoei’ on his helmet. I explained to him that this was the name of a small Japanese college-within-a-college at the University of Winchester (which he dd not know) but it transpired that his own son had been a student at the University after my time there. So we had a most entertaining encounter there and so we continued on our journey with a lot of story telling and jokes told en route. The coach driver added some witty jokes and comments on his own and entertained us with a list of the achievements of the outstanding Scots scientists and engineers who lived on the outskirts of Dumbarton which we circumnavigated before we arrived at out hotel on the shores of Loch Long. The hotel was spacious, modern and very well equipped and we were amazed by the quality of the accommodation which we had been allocated. I was particularly pleased to have a double bed in which to luxuriate before we dined at 6.30. I got unpacked and my lap top up and running in no time at all although the hot spot signal from my iPhone is much better than the hotel’s own network. My friend and I chatted with many of the young waitressing staff and I gave one of mine (a student who hoped to visit Italy and learn some Italian which was part of her family background) the link to my Mozart website filled with Italian arias which she said she would access and report back to me today. We had a rather run of the mill type meal but I had a salad starter and a mackerel main course and it sufficed. But my friend and I indulged in a bottle of rioja of which we drunk one half the rest being the medicine for this evening. We had some interesting conversations with other (elderly) guests but then turned in to have an early night as most of is had been up since 5.30 in the morning and had not slept very well the night before the journey. Breakfast is at 9.30 and I am up bright and early so after starting this blog I might go down and have a morning constitutional walk filling my lungs full of good, pure Scottish mountain air!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We set off at 10.30 for Dunoon, a small Scottish town but the weather actually turned cold and blustery when we arrived there. So most of us walked along the High Street gazing in the occasional shop window and eventually made our way into a bakery that sold coffee which was crowded out. After this, we made our way back onto the coach and motored by the side of the Holy Loch, he home of the famous submarine base. Eventually, after another drive through the mountains we arrived at Benmore Botanical Gardens, famous amongst other things for some redwood trees. But there was still a rally icy blast and I was especially pleased to have the benefit of my nice woollen UMIST university scarf to give me some relief against the icy blasts. Eventually, some of us sought out the relief of the tea rooms and a warming cup of tea and I chatted a lot with a couple of ladies who had net whilst their husbands were having dialysis and died about eight years ago. Some warming sun came out the minute before we were due to depart and so I remarked to others that we had arrived about two hours too early. Then we had a long drive back through some snow covered mountains and ‘lengthy’ lochs before arriving back in the hotel in the late afternoon. The next day promises a trip to Inveraray which is a town in Argyll and Bute. Located on the western shore of Loch Fyne, near its head, Inveraray is a former royal burgh and known affectionately as ‘The Capital of Argyll.’ It is the traditional county town of Argyll, and the ancestral seat to the Duke of Argyll. Loch Fyne is best known to people in England as the chain of restaurants in which they originally sold mussels and branched out to other seafood.In the past, I have eaten with the ‘Old Fogies’ at the Loch Fyne restaurant in Winchester. Although we had a good breakfast before we departed this morning, I am quite look forward to a good evening meal as today has been one of those ‘coffee and biscuits’ type days to keep us going. After a quick text to my son, he alerted me to the fact that is the Women’s Six Nations competition so I am tuned into watching Wales v. Scotland whilst resting after the day out and getting myself in the mood for dinner. Every holiday has its own particular characteristics and this one is marked for me by the fact that of or party of about 20, many have done the trip before and when the coach arrives at a destination, many make tracks for destinations with which they are familiar. So as a lone traveller, I find myself tagging onto the coat-tails of other holidaymakers so that I know where to go. Benmore Gardens in particular was one of those attractions where you are presented with a map and then people disappear in all directions (usually on groups of two or three). Although we are being left to do our thing in Glasgow when we come to visit it, the coach driver has decided he will do a little ‘off-piste’ with us and give us a guided tour of what he considers to be the most iconic sights of Glasgow for a small additional charge per head (to which I think we all readily agreed) If only for nostalgic reasons, I am quite looking forward to the sail on Loch Lomond as I used to camp on an island off the little village of Balmaha a third of the way up Loch Lomond when a music teacher\/scoutmaster organised summer camps for us when I was about 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
What an incredibly good first day of the holiday. My family deposited me and heavy suitcase in the bus station at Bromsgrove and the coach turned up some ten minutes late. I was joined by my North American friend and then we set off, calling to a service station where we had a change of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8191,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8190\/revisions\/8191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}