Whiteinch

Zoe and Sean had warned us last night that this could be a busy weekend as it was a public holiday on Monday, so we decided to head off earlyish (8.15am) for our tour of the Lochs and southern highlands north and west of Glasgow.
The closest (and largest) of the lochs is Loch Lomond, and we followed this up it’s western flank for quite a way before branching off to follow a valley up to the ‘Rest and Be Thankful’ pass. We stopped at the viewing area for some morning tea before heading on past some other lochs and quaint towns such as Inverary.
We arrived at the Chrauchan power station on the banks of Loch Awe with the intention of doing a tour of this rather amazing piece of engineering (a hydro power station 1 km underground).
We, along with a number of other potential tourists were disappointed to see the sign at their closed facility indicating that tours during their high, summer season run every day- except on weekends!
So we sat in the carpark for a few minutes and watched a YouTube video on the power station instead.
The weather was exactly what you might expect of the Scottish highlands- cool, a little breezy, some showers and mist, not the fine weather that the forecast had promised.
We circled back towards Glasgow via a different route, stopping at Kilchurn castle and then back down the full length of Loch Lomond.
We found a nice spot by the edge of the lake to sit in the car and have some lunch.
Here I also took the opportunity to serenade Loss with a solo rendition of the old Scottish song ‘On the Bonnie, Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond’, which she seemed to enjoy immensely (even though she claims she had never heard the song before).
We could see the ‘steep sides of Ben Lomond’ and the highland hills bathed ‘in soft purple hue’ and as my dulcet tones rang out across the loch, my only disappointment was that it wasn’t recorded.
Apart from my splendid singing, it was also a beautiful spot to have lunch.

Fortunately we were on our way back to Glasgow and the traffic was quite light in our direction, but as predicted it was heavy heading the other way.
We saw a number of hardy Scottish souls camping by the banks of the lochs - even a few swimming in the rather frigid water. Apart from a few kayaks and SUP’s, there was very minimal boating activity observed.
We got back to Glasgow at about 3.30pm. In all, we passed by at least half a dozen different lochs of varying shapes and sizes.

Fortified by a coffee at the apartment, we then set off at 4pm to explore Glasgow itself. Cars are very much discouraged within the city precincts, so we decided to do another hop on / off bus tour which worked out well.
We walked 20 minutes to the nearest pickup point, did a full lap (and a half) of the city to eventually alight at the University. There were a number of points of interest including a big celebration by Celtic soccer fans with noise, colour (green and white), flares and police out in force.
We walked into the university and found the quite famous cloisters area, headed out to the front of the University which gave a nice view down over the city, and then armed with some extra ‘local info’ from Zoe also found Ashton Place which is a great little restaurant precinct not far away. We probably would have stayed there for dinner but it was getting quite cold out now (although most of the Scots were in short and T-shirts) and we had already bought groceries earlier, so we walked the 25 minutes back to the warmth of our unit - arriving right at 7pm - to enjoy dinner at home and an early night, hopefully.Read more