Scotland, Here We Come! (Part Two)

Day 3 (Continued)
We had so much fun at Eglinton Park (home of the Montgomery earls) that it was hard to leave, but we wanted to do a little more exploring before going back to Dumbarton.  From the Eglinton Park/ Kinwinning area, we headed south past Irvine, Troon, and Prestwick to Ayr, which is a coastal town on the "Firth of Clyde" in the Atlantic Ocean. 

Ayr was the third item on our list of places we wanted to visit.   Ayr was one of the areas Roger lived in on his mission.  One of the things he loved in Scotland was being so close to the ocean.  We wandered until we found a road that took us down by the beach.  Notice the high sea wall along the beach on the left side of the picture.

The sunlight seemed to sparkle and bounce off the ocean waves, and it was so beautiful. 

 

From Ayr, we headed back up to Glasgow and over to Dumbarton. 

We were going to go inside the Dumbarton Castle, but it had already closed for the day, so we just took a few pictures from the outside.

  Part of the castle is at the bottom of the bluff next to the River Clyde.  You can see the wall and stairs going up the side of the bluff and there are more buildings on top.  Someone told us there are a lot of stairs.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
We still had some daylight left, so we decided to take a drive along Loch Lomond.  This home was so colorful, we had to stop and take a picture.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

We drove a little further and found a little village called Luss.  The buildings are still being lived in and some are used as shops, but it seems to be a historical preservation area, so it had that quaint "old world" look to it -- well, except for the cars.

There was a very old church in Luss with the cemetery surrounding it.

We walked down to the dock to take a look at Loch Lomond.

Not only did we find Loch Lomond, we found Ben Lomond which is the mountain in Scotland that "Ben Lomond" above North Ogden is named after.   This is very important to our family because quoting my Grandfather Montgomery when he was talking about where he grew up in North Ogden:  "Nestling at the base of the ten thousand foot peak of Ben Lomand named so by my Grandmother Montgomery because it reminded her of the Ben Lomand in Scotland.  The scene of her childhood and native land." 

Ben Lomond

"The Village Rest" is where we had dinner that evening. I had a yummy soup, and Roger had a shepherd's pie that was really good.   By the time we finished eating, it was dark.  Driving in the dark in the rain gave a little extra excitement to driving on the left, but thanks to the GPS, my "interpretive" navigating, and Roger's driving, we made it back to our bed and breakfast with no mishaps.

Day 4
We got up early Tuesday morning (the 6th) and after another Scottish breakfast, we headed back to the Glasgow Airport to return the rental car and make connections with CIE Tours.  We met up with the tour directors Eunan and Rosie at 10 a.m. and loaded up onto one of those nice big coach tour buses with the big windows.  For the next few days, we would let someone else do the driving and we could relax.

We drove into Glasgow where we checked into the Glasgow Thistle Hotel.

Then we loaded onto the bus again for a tour of Glasgow.  (Our bus is next to the curb.) 

A street in Glasgow.

One of the old bridges that we saw in Glasgow - this was the best picture I could get.

Most of the pictures we took of Glasgow were taken from the windows of the bus, so how good they turned out depended on the angle, the speed of the scenery going by, and oh, yes, did we mention that it was raining most of the time that day?   So we got a lot of "raindrops on the window" pictures.

I thought this was a cool bridge.  A little of the "new" mixed in with the "old" in Glasgow.

More of Glasgow.





























After driving around Glasgow for awhile, we arrived at our destination for the afternoon - Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, originally opened in 1901.

Couldn't resist taking this picture - this was the first thing we saw when we walked in the front doors - the entrance to the gift shop.

This is one of the paintings in a room that had artifacts and paintings about Scotland. The only thing that I was disappointed in was that there wasn't more dedicated to the history of Scotland. You'd think that if you are in a museum in Scotland that there would be more dedicated to Scottish history. 

When we were finished at the museum, we drove back to the hotel to relax before dinner.   We had to wait quite awhile for our dinner, but it was really great and the company was good.  We sat with a couple who had emigrated to the United States from Russia.