Our tour guide Gary, who runs Student Tours Scotland, was also really entertaining, and he told some funny stories and old Scottish fairy tales throughout the day. I enjoyed the tour so much that I decided to come to one of the free pub nights in Glasgow with Anni a few weeks later, and that was a good time as well. I hope I get the chance to take one more tour with the company before I leave Scotland, but sadly, I don't think I will have time.
Anyway, Glencoe was amazing and totally worth coming back to see.
Another big trip I went on was a weekend in Arran, organized by Arcadia. Arran is a beautiful island off the west coast of Scotland, and like many of Scotland's islands, you need a boat to get to it. On Saturday morning, we set out from Glasgow to take the ferry to Arran. When we got there, the thing that immediately struck me most about Arran was the palm trees. Even though it's not a tropical island, it still never gets cold enough to kill the palm trees, because of the jet stream. The town part of the island reminded me of the southern U.S., like Louisiana or something, especially because of all the summer homes we saw there. Arran is a very big tourist destination, but outside of the port town, it's still very remote and rural with fantastic hills and mountains.
We didn't go hiking actually, but this is what the mountains looked like in the distance. I would love to come back and climb some of them.
The first place we visited was Brodick Castle, which was more like a palace than a castle. The furnishings were really fancy, and the cool thing was that the rooms got older the further you went into the building. That was because the castle started out as a small military stronghold, and then its subsequent owners gradually added onto it so they could live there in comfort.
We weren't allowed to take pictures inside, so here's one I found online.
After the castle, we stopped at a tiny museum about Arran's history, but it wasn't very interesting. So my friend Steph and I spent most of the time hanging out in the tearoom with Ty whom we'd previously met on the Borderlands trip. We had a good conversation, and I ordered some really delicious Victoria sponge cake.
From the museum, we had a long, bumpy ride to the hostel on twisty dirt roads. Everyone felt pretty gross, including me, and I rarely get carsick. Unfortunately, it was dinner time when we arrived, and nobody felt very hungry. But by the time we got sorted into our hostel rooms and ordered dinner at the restaurant down the road, we felt more like eating. The food was pretty good, and I had my first Belhaven Black, which I liked. Belhaven Best is one of Scotland's major beers, next to Tennent's. I don't particularly love the regular Belhaven, but the stout is better.
After dinner, we watched this really goofy movie from 1949 called "Whisky Galore" about a whisky shortage in a little Scottish town during World War 2. Everyone in the town is really sad until a boat wrecks and dumps tons of crates of whisky into the sea, so the town takes it and has to hide it from the government officials. The moral of the story was literally "don't drink whisky or it will ruin your life." It was way funnier than anyone expected, and I think we all enjoyed it.
The walk back up the hill from the restaurant to the hostel was a real adventure because it was pitch black outside, and there weren't even any stars or moon in the sky because of the heavy cloud coverage. We had to use our cellphone screens as flashlights.
The next day, we visited some ancient standing stones, which are basically the Stonehenge of Scotland. I think they're older though, and way taller. The nice thing about Arran's stones is that, unlike Stonehenge, there are no crowds and you can walk right up to them and touch them. The only kind of bad thing is that you have to walk down a really muddy road for about a half an hour to get there, so we were kind of late getting back to the bus. They were my favorite part of the trip though, so it was worth it, and we still made it to the ferry in time. The road to the stones was also really misty and scenic and a few other people agreed with me that it was a perfect picture of what we had imagined Scotland would look like before we came.
The boat ride back to the mainland was much bumpier than the one to Arran had been, but at least I didn't feel sick. We were all really tired by that point though, so we sort of snoozed between conversations on the ferry.
The second to last thing on our agenda was another lavishly furnished castle, this one from the Georgian era. Culzean Castle had a really spectacular seaside view, and apparently you can arrange to have your wedding there. I'll have to keep that in mind because I would love to have my wedding in a castle, and this one looked particularly perfect.
There are also some rooms in the castle that they gave to Dwight D. Eisenhower after World War 2, but we weren't allowed to see those.
The final stop on our tour was the Whitlee Wind Farm, which most of us were not very excited about. I thought it could still be kind of cool though, and it actually was interesting to learn about how everything worked. The wind turbines were way bigger than I'd imagined, and when you stood directly under them and looked up, it looked like they were slowly falling on top of you.
In the end, the Arran trip was fun, and it made me want to come back someday and see more of the island.
Song of the Day (driving and walking through Arran made me think of this song for some reason):
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