Pictures from this part of the trip can be found in the Oban gallery.
Wednesday was a busy day. We got up a little early, showered, finished packing, and then met Morag for an early breakfast. Then, we headed to the train station and took the train to Anderston Station in Glasgow, about a 10-minute walk from the car rental place.
We ended up with a little Hyundai i30 hatchback with a six-speed manual transmission. All in all, it turned out to be a good car for this trip. It had plenty of room for our two small bags, it got reasonable gas mileage, and it was easy to fit in tight places. After picking up the car, we got on the highway and headed out of town toward Loch Lomond, which is on the way to Oban. We finally got on the road around 11:00am.
As we got closer to Loch Lomond, Julie had the idea that we should stop and look at a castle called out in our guidebook. Of course, we got lost trying to find it, and we ended up in a village with very narrow roads before Ken really understood what he needed to do when he met oncoming traffic. This involved some cursing and the distinct smell of burning clutch. Once we got things sorted out, we had lunch at a cafe in the village. After we ate, the cafe people gave us directions to castle, which was just a few miles away. When we got there, it was not open to visitors — and apparently had not been for some time. Oh well, at least the car was in one piece.
After getting back on the main road, we were pretty near to Loch Lomond. This is the largest freshwater lake in Scotland, around 27 square miles of surface area (but very deep). We've both loved the idea of Loch Lomond since singing The Bonnie Banks o' Loch Lomond in Marquette's chorus so many years ago. We pulled off at a few rest areas to get pictures, and then took a side trip to Luss, a historic village on the lake. Luss is cute, but definitely a sort of tourist trap, judging by the number of tour buses in the visitor center. Loch Lomond was our first real view of the Scottish highlands, and it reminded us a lot of Glacier National Park.
After leaving Luss, we stopped at Inveraray Castle. We were originally going to tour the castle, but we checked the time and decided that we would rather arrive in Oban early enough to take a tour at the Oban Distillery. So, instead, we just paid a few pounds to park and walk the grounds. We saw some old settlement ruins and some big old cedar trees in the forest around the castle. Before leaving, we got some ice cream from their cafe as a snack. After that, it was off to Oban.
Ken was pretty relieved to arrive in Oban. He was having a difficult time adjusting to driving the car. Right-hand drive was ok, but Scottish roads are narrow, and it was hard to place the car properly in the lane. He either bumped the curb or shoulder on one side, or felt like he was crowding the center line on the other. To add to the confusion, we had no idea what the speed limit was, sort of like on country roads in the U.S. where a 55 MPH limit is implied. In Oban, while Julie was checking into the B&B, Ken spent a little time calibrating his idea of the car's width using the lines on the road by his parking space. He realized that he could place the car about 6" closer to the center of the road, and he figured out what the view needed to look like in the mirrors when he was placed properly. Gradually, this made things easier over the coming days.
Parking for the hotel (Gramarvin Guest House) was interesting, our first real experience with the Scottish idea of two-way roads that are only one lane wide (a.k.a. single-track). We had to drive down a single-track road, make a u-turn into a more major road at the end, and then drive back down the single-track road the other direction so we would have room to make the turn into the hotel parking lot. Later on in the trip, this would seem almost normal, but it was a little nerve-wracking at this point.
After getting settled into the hotel, we walked 10 minutes down to the harbor in Oban and paid for the next tour at the Oban Distillery, which was established in 1794. It was only about 15 minutes until the tour started, so we killed some time looking through their shop and at some of their displays. The distillery was really interesting, in some ways quite similar to a brewery. One interesting fact is that the whisky is aged in bourbon barrels recycled from a distillery in America (but they wouldn't say which distillery).
At the end, we got two samples: first a high-proof sample right out of the barrel (before being cut down to "normal" percentage of alcohol), and then a sample of bottled Oban 14 Year Old whisky. As a souvenir, they gave us two Oban sipping glasses.
After finishing up at the distillery, we walked a few blocks to have dinner at a restaurant called Coast. After dinner, we walked around the Oban harbor area to figure out where we needed to go to catch the ferry on Thursday morning (which was more complicated than we expected it to be). Then, it was back the hotel to relax for an hour before going to bed.
Thursday was also a full and action-packed day, one of Ken's favorite days of the entire trip. We got up early and were out of the hotel before 7:00am. Since we were leaving so early, the hotel packed us a take-way continental breakfast.
We walked down into Oban, past the harbor, and out to the ferry terminal on the other side. There, we picked up all of our tickets for the day. Our day started with the 7:45am ferry from the mainland to the Isle of Mull, about a 30-minute trip. At the port of Craignure on Mull, we got off the ferry and picked up a bus to take us on the hour-long trip to the village of Fionnphort, on the other side of the island.
The views on the bus ride were spectacular, and Ken learned some valuable lessons about how to drive on single-track roads by watching the bus driver. It pays to look ahead for possible oncoming traffic, so you can either pull off when possible, or wait in front of a pull-off to let someone get around you. Occassionally, the bus had to back up to a previous pull-off. On the positive side, everyone was pretty calm. Watching the bus driver made things a lot easier for us when we had to drive single-track on Skye a few days later.
Once arriving in Fionnphort, we were supposed to catch a tour boat to the island of Staffa for the morning. However, there was a mix-up and the boat didn't have enough space. The tour company told us to go to Iona first, and then they'd pick us up on Iona and take us to Staffa with a different trip at noon. So, we hopped the 10-minute ferry to Iona, which we could see just across the bay. Once getting off the ferry, we stopped a little restaurant and bought take-away sandwiches for lunch, since we didn't know whether we'd have any time for lunch before heading to Staffa (this turned out to be a good idea).
Iona is an interesting island. It has been settled for a long time. The island started to gain importance around 563 AD, when a monk named Columba established a settlement on the island. Later, a Benedictine abbey was established on the island, and it has long been a place of pilgrimage. The abbey was abandoned, but was later restored by the Iona community in the mid-1900s.
It was about a 15-minute walk from the harbor up to the abbey, and we spent the next few hours walking around the building and the grounds. One of Julie's favorite memories of the trip was walking around the abbey and hearing a cantor practicing a song Julie knows from the Basilica, which was composed at the abbey (called Take Me As I Am). After finishing up at the abbey, we walked back to the harbor. On the way, we got held up for a few minutes because a film crew was filming a movie scene in the harbor.
At noon, the Staffa tour boat picked up about 6 of us and took us back to Fionnphort on Mull, where the afternoon tour joined us — another 50 or so people. The boat was full. From there, we headed out on a 45-minute boat ride to Staffa. (We ate our lunch on the way from Iona back to Mull, and were glad we had thought ahead and bought it.)
Staffa is spectacular. It is a volcanic island with unusual hexagonal vertical columns and a cap of basalt on top. From the boat landing (which can be used only in relatively calm seas), you can climb up a steep staircase to the top of the island, or you can walk along the edge of the island near the waterline toward Fingal's Cave. We walked up top first (to avoid the crush of people going to the cave) and then went to the cave toward the end of our time on the island. After visiting the cave, we explored some tidal pools down near the water.
After finishing up at Staffa, we reversed our trip, taking the tour boat back to Fionnphort on Mull, the bus back to Craignure, and the ferry back to Oban on the mainland. (We had enough time to grab a snack in Fionnphort before the bus arrived.) By the time we arrived in Oban, it was around 5:00pm.
Back in Oban, we caught an early dinner at a fish and chips place in the harbor, and then headed back to the hotel to shower and rest up a little. Then, around 8:30pm, we walked back to the harbor to Skipinnish Ceilidh House, for a night of traditional Scottish music and dance provided by the band Skippinish.
We weren't quite sure what to expect, but it turned out to be a lot of fun, and we didn't go back to the hotel until after midnight. Orignally, when we arrived, the place was pretty empty, so we grabbed a beer and a cider and sat down to wait for the show to start at 9:00pm. Then, twice in the next 15 minutes, we heard bagpipe music outside and a huge group of people came in all together. It turned out that the bagpipers from the band were making the rounds of likely hangouts for young people (like the hostels) and leading them to the Ceilidh House with promises of reduced admission (and beer). It was a brilliant idea, and it brought a lot of energy to the room. By the time the show started, there were a few hundred people sitting and standing around.
We originally thought that we would hear mostly folk music and there would be a little dancing. Instead, the night was mostly group dancing with some music performances scattered in the middle. We even got to see a girl in highland dress performing some traditional dances, like the sword dance. The group dances were big happy "barn dance" type routines that the band taught us a little at a time. By the end of the night, we were all getting better at it, and the dance floor was packed with hot, sweaty, laughing people trying to not trip over their own feet or each other. It was a blast, and it was successful mainly because we middle-aged people who bought tickets ahead of time were joined by the enthusiastic young people from the hostels and bars around town.
The band played two sets with a 15-minute break in the middle. Then, when the band finished up, a DJ came out and started playing club music. We stuck around for a little of that, and decided to head back to the hotel. We liked Skippinish so much that we bought 3 of their CDs. Skippinish music became the soundtrack for the rest of our trip — it was virtually the only thing we listened to in the Hyundai while driving around the highlands for the next few weeks.