the other day kevin brown asked me when i was going to post more photos of our trip.  i felt like i’d been doing a very good job of posting them, but now i realize it’s been a while.  i have a great deal of difficulty these days KEEPING UP with everything, basically.

so…day one of biking: not that hard until we got lost. no rain while we biked.  A circular route from Callander then back again.

day two of biking: much harder, more hilly, gravelly bike trail.  hard rain on and off.  from Callander to Loch Katrine and back.

day three of biking:  left Callander, went to Killin.  Lots of rain for the first hour or so but not so hilly, then VERY HILLY and a beautiful day and beautiful, beautiful country side.  utterly exhausted by the end of the day.

day four:  from killin to aberfeldy.  Wednesday, July 15th.

Since the day before we had coasted four miles down into the town, i had a little bit of worry that we’d have to climb back up out of it.  but now we were going on the road, not the bike path.  when we set out it looked cloudy but the clouds were moving fast and we hoped they were on their way out.

right when we started out of town we came across this tree with something taking a nap underneath it.

it’s a SHEEP!  very very cute.

we biked for approximately four minutes, and then it started raining.  i had these blue plastic rain pants (i wish i had a picture of them but when it’s raining you don’t feel like taking pictures so much) and i put them on; i’d forgotten to wear them the day before…or the day before that.  because the road went through a lot of trees, the rain wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  the trees weren’t as thick as the ones the day before…and the rain wasn’t falling quite as hard.

or at least that’s how i remember it.

the blue rain paints, though, were a pain in the ass.  it was chilly outside, but because the pants were plastic my legs started getting very warm and soon my legs were all wet because they were sweaty.  cold and wet, not a good day.  plus the pants didn’t move well.

the rain started to let up, and this is the beautiful loch tay.

this photo could be a postcard.

on this day the road would go up for a while then level out…then up more, then level out…and on and on. there’s me, way back there, finally giving up on riding for a while.

as you can see by the sign, we’re in the heart of scotland.

this cute little gnome was just out in the middle of nowhere.

this is one of the reasons why i love biking in a place – we came across this ruined house, and it was cool to see it up close.  if we’d been going by in a car, we wouldn’t have stopped to take a picture, and we just couldn’t have seen everything along the way so up close and personal.

we think we might have seen one red squirrel one day, but it was kind of far away.

on this road we passed a facy house with a tennis court…and then saw a helicopter parked outside.  fancy people.  i took video, but i dont know why kevin didn’t take a photo.  there were some people outside the house; maybe he thought they didn’t want their picture taken.

we arrived at the Crannog Center.  a crannog is a dwelling that people in the iron age built out on the Lochs.  they had tall pointy roofs and a big family group of maybe 20 people lived in them, plus their livestock.  these crannogs were all over the lochs, and they sunk down into the lochs after time and they were preserved because…because…because of the peat?  because of something in the lochs.

so they’ve been doing archaelogical digs and excavating stuff they found in the crannogs, and on this site they re-created one.  we stopped and debated about taking a tour, and decided we might as well.

this is the recreated crannog.

i took video of the tour inside, and it was really cool.  it’s here that the woman giving the tour talked about the bracken that the peopl spread all over the floor because it would be soft.  the crannog was a lot bigger than it looks like in the picture.  she talked about all the bracken growing everywhere in scotland and we looked at the bracken on the floor and realized that bracken is FERNS.  maybe you already knew that.

after the tour, a guy demonstrated all kinds of interesting things that they did back then, like a complicated way of making fire, and sawing something.  i videotaped a lot of it until he told me that they didn’t allow that.  i did get plenty of his scottish accent, which was neat.

we went into the gift shop and they had all kinds of great stuff there – beautiful scarves, nice jewelry, all kinds of stuff – and i bought some things.  i bought one scarf for myself but figured there would be plenty more in the big city of edinburgh, so i’d wait to buy mom a scarf there.

we left the crannog center and rode a couple of miles around the loch to the lovely little town of Kenmore.  We stopped at the Kenmore hotel for a tasty lunch.  once again, i don’t know why kevin didn’t take photos of kenmore.  why, kevin, why?

we had ridden18 miles and had 14 to go.   after our leisurely lunch we set out away from town.  the next stop was supposed to be the town of Fortingall which had a yew tree that was supposed to be the oldest thing in europe.  but as we were leaving kevin looked at the signs and we stopped and read the map and the instructions.

if we went to see the oldest thing in europe, we’d have to go around the loch some more, and then go in the opposite direction to get to Aberfeldy.  what if we skipped the tree?  we would shave some 8 miles off our trip, that’s what.

we decided that since the sign at the kenmore hotel said it was the oldest hotel in scotland, we had seen enough oldest things and we could miss the tree.  this means that instead of 14 miles, we only had to ride six.  piece of cake.

we rode to aberfeldy, feeling like we’d won the lottery, we were so happy to have shortened our journey.  we stopped to tour a castle, the castle menzies, but it was kind of run down.  doune castle had been so impressive, but this one was privately owned and clearly they weren’t doing so well with the upkeep.  kevin took no pictures.

we rode two more miles to aberfeldy and wanted to visit the dewar’s whiskey distillery.  we got to our b&b, a lovely place, and the woman there said she’d call ahead for us, because they were about to stop giving tours for the day.  so we walked really quickly to dewar’s, which was a little over a mile out of town.

kevin took these photos sometime when we were walking, but i don’t know where they were – somewhere in the town, i supposed – and i don’t know why he took them.  perhaps he’ll explain.

this was right outside of town.

we got to the distillery and because the aberfeldy distillery had been bought by dewar’s, the museum inside was very very fancy.  we didn’t have much time to go through it, though.

and then we took the tour.  i took some video, but you can’t hear what i’m saying because it’s a very loud place.  we didn’t remember it being that loud.

the reason i look so disheveled here is because i didn’t even have time to comb my hair before rushing out the door.

here’s our tour guide.  he looks so neanderthal with those huge eyebrows, but he was actually a good guide.

afterwards we sampled and bought some whiskey, and bought a couple of big truffles.  we were happy to take a leisurely walk back to the b&b, and had a delicious dinner in a nearby pub.

it started raining when we got back to the b&b and it was nice to be inside, warm and dry, as the rain pounded on the windows.

ok then,

friday grace.