Lochs, Glens & Bens

What a day. 12.5 hours on a bus. Talk about exhausting, all that sitting. We did see some pretty wonderful things and learned a lot about Scotland. Our bus departed Edinburgh at 8am and we went North West on our way to see Nessie, the Loch Ness monster. On our way we passed by many other castles, and even stopped near a few. One we passed, saw, but had no time for pictures was the Doune castle. It was easily recognzable, for any Monty Python fans as it is where the Holy Grail castle scenes were filmed. In the movie, they actually used it as 3 different castles, all filmed from different sides.

We also learned that Lakes are called Lochs (knew that actually), Mountains are called Bens and Valleys are called Glens. In fact, the Glen term is used in many scotch brand names, which also describes the valley where they get the water to make the Scotch.

The Highlands country was amazing. Lot's of really wonderful scenery, lot's of sheep and overall very nice weather. In fact we've been blessed with a lot of sunshine, still overcast, but a lot of sunshine. We made it to Loch Ness and had a wonderful time taking a boat ride out on the Loch. It's hard to believe how dark the water is. It really looks like black water. It's easy to see why Nessie can hide in there. Although our boat had some pretty intersting Sonar, we were able to get some 3D images of the bottom of the Loch. Very deep, very steep and very cold. They say the water temp is only 3C and it never changes.

Got to get some sleep, after all the real fun starts tomorrow when Mike, Andy and I tee off at Gulane at 11am. In case you didn't know it, Andy didn't travel with us, but is actually a fellow HP'er who resides in Scotland and help setup all the tee times and pick the courses. Cheers to Andy Miller.

Michael MacGreen