Scotland - Day 10

Stirling

Monday morning began rather leisurely. Once all at the cottages were ready we headed on to the train station to pick up the walkers. While we were waiting, I took the opportunity to run into the nearby corner store to steal a glance at the newspaper to find out who won the U.S. Open. That's two consecutive U.S. Opens I've been traveling for now.

Anyways, once all we assembled and squeezed into the autos we set out for Wallace Monument in Stirling. We took a group picture with the rather Mel-Gibson-like statue of William Wallace then began our trek to the top. Before we could climb the 246 steps of the tower, we first had to ascend a good-sized hill. At the desk, we were all provided with listening devices telling about William Wallace and the displays inside the monument. The staircase began straight but most of it was a quite narrow spiral. On the way the top there were 3 levels to stop and view displays. The first had a Wallace video and various related artifacts; the second, my favorite, had busts of many famous Scots and beautiful stained glass windows; the third displayed information about the scene viewed from the top of the monument. We finally made it to the top and tried to make out various landmarks in the area, most notably Stirling Castle.

Somehow, I wound up ahead of a lot of the group and since I was a bit frustrated with Beth over some communication problems, I headed on back to the base of the hill for some alone time. Everyone went at their own pace so when we were finally back together, it turned out Jay had gone off exploring and wasn't back. It was well into the afternoon by that time so some of us went ahead to Stirling Castle while the others looked for Jay.

Arriving at Stirling Castle, I discovered I had left my prepaid Historic Scotland pass at the cottage, so I had to pretend to be David and Lori's daughter on their family pass. We hadn't gotten far into exploring the castle when the rest of the group caught up with us. One of the shopkeepers told us there would be a guided tour available soon if we waited by the well so we waited there until we figured out that the shopkeeper was wrong and the last tour of the day had already gone. We went ahead and did some touring of our own and specifically went down to where they were weaving tapestries of a unicorn hunt. My favorite thing about the tapestries was trying to find little things, like a frog or dragonfly, hidden in them.

Since we hadn't had much of a lunch, we were all ready for supper and found a restaurant with both American food and decor to satisfy our bellies before parting with the walkers for the evening.