Scotland Museum Crawl

We finalized our plans for the day as we had breakfast at our hotel.  I decided that I would try a wee bit o' haggis.  Amy declined.  I was expecting the taste of scrapple I had in Pennsylvania a few years ago, but much to my surprise it was actually quite tasty.

Our first stop for the day was the St. Andrew's museum.  This was about an hour from our hotel and situated in St. Andrews, of golf fame.  The museum was nice and the desk workers were very helpful.  They have two carved stone balls in their collection.

Our plan was to visit the golf museum also, as it is the home of golf.  It was a bit challenging to get there: several wrong turns, going completely around a roundabout, and stalling the car doing a u turn on a street that suddenly became one way.  I wondered what par for getting to the museum was?  We learned more about the history of golf, which was fun.

The next destination was the McManus museum in Dundee.  This is a large city (156,000) on the way to Aberdeen.  Let's just say we are probably not liked by everyone in Scotland today.  I went twice around one roundabout and maybe drove down a pedestrian lane.  Still no fiery car crash.  I have also negotiated several parking structures and tight parking lots.  Once we got to the museum, we saw their collection of carved stone balls and headed for some lunch.

A one-lane bridge we crossed.

A small Scottish town.

Much of the countryside was just a blur.

Montrose was our final museum of the day.  They had a really nice collection of carved stone balls.  They also had some other interesting items such as a hat worn by Napolean and a death mask of Napolean.  Like every small museum we have visited, the staff have been very friendly.

We saw quite a few roses.  The bees were all abuzz.

On the road to Aberdeen we saw signs for Donnattar Castle and decided to stop.  It is perched high on an outcropping in the North Sea.  Also a perch for hundreds of gulls.  The weather had become cloudy, making the view very nice.

Donnattar Castle

We wound our way around Aberdeen until we found our Hotel.  It was conveniently located in a nest of one-way streets, and others under construction.  Parking a couple blocks away.  Luckily we were able to unload our bags.  We had dinner at the hotel, as there was not much else close open.  Our hotel was generally nice.

It was also time for laundry.  We used some time in the laundry room to work on email and blogging.  Then, BAM!  Amy was charging her cell phone, as she had several times on the trip, and the charger circuits fried, tripping the electrical breaker for the room outlets.  Luckily the lights were on a different circuit.  The hotel staff could not find the breaker (even after much searching), so we were without electronics in the room for blogging or email, so we called it a night, hoping for power in the morning.