We’ve been pushing the limits this whole vacation, so today
we slept in until about 9:00. It felt
really good as we had another full day of sightseeing on the menu.
First we headed to the little town of Bowling. It is a little port town where they have some
small ship locks that they open by hand.
They have huge levers that two people push on to open the locks. We didn’t get to see any boats go through,
but Spencer proved that you could open them by hand!
We walked down and looked at the ocean leading to the port
of Glasgow. About a mile down the road
there is the first ancestral castle that the Colquhouns lived in. We drove by it and took a look, but you can’t
get very close because there was some oil mess that they are cleaning up. It is a cute house with turrets right down by
the ocean.
After stopping and taking pictures at the Colquhoun road in
Dumbarton we stopped by the Dumbarton Castle.
The castle sits on top of an old volcano. All that is left is the solid rock core. It was an important place because if you held
that rock you held the port. So people
have been fighting over it for centuries.
The Vikings, English, Scottish, French, etc. have all laid claim to the
rock and fortifications.
It is important to the Colquhouns because they laid siege to
the castle, took it and gave it to the King.
For that they became barons and received about 50,000 acres of land
around Loch Lomond. They are barons to
this day!
Mary, Queen of Scots, William Wallace all stayed in the
castle there. In fact, that is the
location where William Wallace was held for 8 days before being taken to die.
The actual castle isn’t as impressive as the location. The castle just looks like a nice house. But we explored the French prison,
fortifications around and on top of the rock.
It has a great view and was obviously the place to be if you wanted to
control the port.
After the castle we headed to the southwest end of Loch
Lomond. The kids really wanted to do
something outdoors, so we rented a little 6 person canoe/katamaran type boat
called the Katakanu. It was really fun
to have all of us on one boat. We
paddled around the small bay. We saw a
float plane take off and paddled close to an old paddle boat.
From there we hopped in the car and drove over to Stirling
castle. Stirling castle was the main
castle for Scotland for the King. It was
impressive. They had people dressed up
in medieval outfits and would talk as if they were the King’s priest or
bodyguard, etc. The castle was in really
great condition. The great room was
HUGE. It had 5 giant fireplaces.
We also got to see some ladies weaving a tapestry. It is going to take them about 2 years to do
a replica of one of the unicorn tapestries from the castle. We didn’t realize that the unicorn was such
as important symbol of Christianity in Scotland. There were unicorn tapestries and paintings
all over the place. Stirling castle sits
up on another huge hill above a beautiful valley. It was a great natural fortification and gave
the King beautiful views of his lands!
After the castle, we walked through an old church cemetery
and found lots of Colquhouns, Macfarlanes, Gibsons, Murrays, Taylors, etc. It is amazing how many names you recognize of
people back home. The largest tomb in
the cemetery was a huge pyramid of a local businessman that had a seed
business It must have been pretty
successful as the pyramid was very large!
For those of you that know my kids they are always looking
to find diamonds in parking lots. Ashton
may have actually found one in the parking lot of the castle. We’ll see if it is glass, a cubic zirconium
or a real diamond! He has a one track
mind, so for the rest of the trip he was asking us to go to a jeweler!
From there we headed to the William Wallace monument. It was already closed, so we took a quick
picture and headed to Nandos. It is that
great chicken place that we ate at in London.
It was right next to our hotel, so it was an easy dinner and then right
to bed!
We got up early to make the drive back towards England. Our goal was to cross England to go to
Alnwick castle, which is the Harry Potter castle, and then drive back acrossed
England to get to Preston and then Liverpool.
Preston is the main location where the church got started in England and
Liverpool was the home of the Beatles!
It took about 3 hours to get to Alnwick (said Annick). It is the main location where they did the
outdoor filming of Harry Potter. It was
totally awesome! The castle was
relatively inexpensive and had tons of interactive stuff for the kids. It was a working castle through the 1970’s,
so it was in really good condition and had a lot of family items in it.
However, all of the activities were the big hit. First off, learning to fly a broomstick. We all learned how to properly mount a broom
and then fly with Elegance, Grace and Poise.
It was really fun and the two actors did a great job. You’ve got to love good British humor!
Our favorite part was the end where we actually learned how
to make our broomsticks elevate and then fly.
Check out the pictures!!!!
After flying around the courtyard we walked through the staterooms of the castle. It was the nicest castle we’ve been in because they had modernized it over the years. It was used by the family at least through the 70s. It was fun to see all of their family pictures, fancy fireplaces, china, canes, art, etc.
Looking at the staterooms took about an hour and then we ran
out to the Bird of Prey demonstration.
This was one of the highlights of the trip. Both Spencer and Jacob got to participate in
the show. Spencer had a hawk fly down
from the castle wall and land on his arm.
Jacob ran and pulled a pheasant across the courtyard. The hawk swooped in and nailed it! Both of the boys were pretty excited to have
been in the show. Spencer was worried that the hawk was going
to peck his eyeballs out, but he came out of it unscathed.
Right after the show we went to the dungeon tour. This was a really well done and scary
theatrical tour of the crypt. The actors
were very good and did a great job of scary the daylights out of us. There were lots of multimedia tricks, lights,
etc. that made it fun and scary. They
told a little story and it turned out that the guy giving the tour was actually
a vampire. When he revealed that he came
at us and Spencer screamed like a school girl!
It was awesome!
While we were getting scared Ashton was playing in basically
a carnival like house of mirrors and turning cylinder like they used to have at
Lagoon. He had to show us when we joined
him how he made it through the mirrors.
Again, it was really well done.
He and Jacob also made some tiles that will air dry hard so that they
can be painted.
Overall we thoroughly enjoyed the time at the Harry Potter
castle and would recommend it to anyone that is visiting the North of England
or Southern Scotland.
From there we drove across England and were impressed with
the small towns and green rolling hills.
We arrived in Preston about dinner time and walked through the square
where President Hinckley served his mission and many of the early leaders of
the church preached. A local member put
together an app for the iPhone that talks about the history of the church
there. It turns out that in the late
1800s Preston was very industrial and the people were very poor.
The temple in Preston is about 10 minutes from downtown, so
we hopped in the car and drove over to the temple. After a quick picture we headed towards
Liverpool. On the way, we brushed up on
our Beatles music by listening to the Help and St. Peppers albums.
After going around the block 5 times, we finally found our
hotel. We actually couldn’t believe it
was the right one. After finding a
parking spot and checking in we were totally surprised at the quality of the
hotel. This was the cheapest hotel of
the trip and by far the nicest. It was
super nice. Still in shock, we asked the
hotel why it was so cheap. It turns out
it was brand new and not quite finished on one floor. So they have a cheap rate until it is all
done. Wow! We scored. Right down on the waterfront, super big
suite, breakfast, etc.
We had a few hours to kill, so we walked along the
waterfront of the Mersey river.
Liverpool was obviously an important port and shipping was important to
Liverpool. Lots of boat anchors, old
boats, sailboats, etc. Jacob really
liked the red brick architecture. We
worked our way down the road to where the Beatles Experience was located. We
knew it was closed, but glad to find it for the morning as we only had an hour
to go through it.
As we walked further down the docks looking for something to
eat we found one restaurant that has 50% off Mondays! We totally scored again with a great meal at
half price. Liverpool was looking like
our kinda city!
The kids have been really, really good on this trip. Kim and I really enjoyed being with them and
the fighting was actually very limited.
It has been fun to see them actually get along!
We slept great in the luxurious hotel, they delivered a
great breakfast to our door and we were off at 8:20 for the Beatles
experience. We had a long drive ahead of
us so we weren’t going to do it, but we figured it was once in a lifetime that
we’d have the whole family in Liverpool.
So when the doors opened at 9:00 we were the first ones through. They had some pretty cool Beatle memorabilia
and had recreated the Cavern and recording studios. Overall it was good, but I think it could be
way better if they included more of their music in the tour. Basically we listed on headphones to the
story of the Beatles while walking around and looking at cool things like
guitars, drumsets, clothes and John Lennon’s glasses.
The Beatles were absolutely amazing in that the whole world
went mad for them. That just doesn’t
happen today.
From Liverpool to Dover was our longest stretch of driving
on the trip. It took all day. We had a chunnel ticket at 4:45 pm, but we
also wanted to see the white cliffs at Dover.
We were worried about the Tour de France getting in our way, so we went
south of London.
We got to the cliffs about 4:00, ran out took a picture and
ran back to the car. The cliffs were
impressive and you could understand why they are a natural barrier to
invaders. There was a cool looking castle on the top of the
cliffs, but we didn’t have time to go through it. We rushed down to the chunnel only to find
out that they had problems and bumped us two hours.
We sat down and were trying to figure out what time we would
get home when Jacob said, what does “Proceed” mean. I ran to ask the ladies and they said all of
a sudden they were back on time. So we
ran to the car and were one of the last ones to make the train. We may have finally beat the Luxembourg
curse!!!!!
After 5-6 Roald Dahl books, Science Friday Podcasts, Radio
West Podcasts and a bunch of music we were glad to pull into our house at 12:30
am. We stopped at McDonalds on the way
and it was obvious that we weren’t in an English speaking country anymore. We all enjoyed being able to communicate
easily for a week. However, I was able
to order 8 specialty, ketchup only hamburgers in French!
Click here to see the pics from the Dumbarton Stirling and Loch Lomond
Click here to see the pics from the Dumbarton Stirling and Loch Lomond
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