May 8 Fort William

We were a bit slow to get started this morning after Gaye's phone rang at 4.45 am this morning. We headed north up the remainder of Lock Lomond and into the Highlands. The Highlands scenery is like the Desert Road on steroids with huge towering mountains and beautiful Lochs surrounded by a mixture of trees and tussock areas.
We stopped in Glencoe for a break which is where the final scenes of the James Bond movie Skyfall?? was filmed. There is so much history here with the clan wars and the wars against the British. The Scots are certainly a feisty breed.
From Glencoe we continued on to Fort William and to our campsite for the next 2 nights. We encountered the worst traffic so far which we later found was due to the road bridge being closed at the bottom of Neptune's Staircase to allow boats to pass. Neptune's Staircase is a staircase of 8 canals built between 1802 and 1822. It is all hydraulic now but originally the locks were all opened manually.
After finding our camp and doing a load of washing we ventured back out to check out Neptune's Staircase. We were fortunate in that a huge riverboat The Lord of the Highlands was about to pass out of the last lock when we arrived and the Jacobite Steamtrain of Harry Potter fame was also returning into Fort William. The road and rail bridges at the bottom of the locks have to be closed and swung out of the way to enable large vessels to move out of the locks. Quite an impressive of engineering.
Today was a red letter day in that we managed to buy Ad-blue for the motorhome and to swap a bottle of gas. A bit over $100NZ for a 6kg bottle. We might have to go easy on the cups of coffee!
Dinner was a chicken pasta in the motorhome. Loving these pre-cooked meals from the supermarket.Read more