holiday part three: in which I get fed up of blogging about my holiday and squeeze the rest of the holiday into one post

(Photo: stone arrow found in Kenmore on the shores of Loch Tay, pointing at nothing in particular as far as we could see.)

This way, please, ladies and gentlemen, for the whistle stop tour of the remainder of Laura and Graham's fabulous Perthshire holiday! You may not be able to sense the holiday's fabulousness from this post but, trust me, fabulous it most definitely was!

This picture (cold beer drunk outside in a lovely rural setting) gives you the basic gist of the majority of the holiday. We spent a lot of time relaxing in country pubs, playing rummy and drinking pints. While we were away, I won nearly every game of rummy. Since we got back I have lost every game. The holiday magic is well and truly over :( Other frequent activities included staying in and playing Scrabble when it rained, going swimming most days, eating cheese and drinking whisky, and watching many a movie in the evenings.

We spent the first two nights of our holiday in Pitlochry where we 'tested our skill' in the brilliant arcade.

I lost track of how many 2p coins I blew on the horse racing... but it was great entertainment and I did win fairly regularly. I just lost overall... That's gambling summed up in a couple of sentences! I'm normally scared of gambling but I threw caution (and 2p coins) to the wind for the duration of the holiday!

If this old school menu outside the arcades wasn't enough to entice you (we went for the ice cream)...

...then maybe this crazy drug addled chip creature would? No, I didn't think so...

We went to the Hydro Electric dam and museum in Pitlochry, too, where I saw these giant electrical cables which I found quite lovely. We didn't see any salmon using the salmon ladder but there was a baby one bobbing about behind the window. Last year, we watched the salmon ladder for a good fifteen minutes before giving up, only to see the digital fish counter go up by one on our way out the door.

After Pitlochry, we spent a week based in Aberfeldy (home of the Highland games) where I spotted this fun sign for a mirror in the local thrift shop. I spotted a few good things in the thrift shop but resisted all of them (except one little book of Roald Dahl stories) because my case was already at the weight of no return...

The place we were staying had lots of ducks. This one came in to watch tv with us and thankfully did not poop on the carpet. I saw it poop quite dramatically on the grass so I really AM thankful, extremely thankful!

This duck had seven fluffy little ducklings.

This one had six even fluffier, even littler ducklings (which it was so tempting to pick up and take home) but on the last day, when I took this picture, there were only five to be seen... I hope duckling number six is ok.

We were also visited at our house by a rather large hedgehog and by a bat so we were pretty close to nature throughout! We were lucky enough to see lots of shooting stars during the meteor showers too, which was brilliant! I don't think we would have managed to see any in Glasgow with all its smog and light pollution.

We used Aberfeldy as a base to go on quite a few daytrips. One day we walked to nearby Weem and went into a really old church where lots of the Menzies family (the local nobility) was buried. It was a really creepy and strange building with A LOT of cobwebs, as you can see from the photo of the poor unfortunate butterfly above.

That's Graham leafing through the visitors' book. They had old visitors books sitting amongst the cobwebs that dated all the way back to the early sixties! It was really interesting to read through them.

We also took a daytrip to lovely Dunkeld and its neighbour, Birnam. It was really rainy that day and I failed to take any photos except for this one of the very unusual looking Birnam police station. I was too busy eating stovies in a cosy riverside pub (mmmmm!) and falling dramatically (and publicly) down hills, which I am still in pain from, both mentally and physically!

Our favourite place was probably Kenmore, a little village on the banks of Loch Tay. It is so pretty and peaceful and lovely. It was actually a scorchingly hot sunny day when we were there but these photos look kind of cloudy. There's Graham skimming stones, something I am very rubbish at.

Here we are (here our legs are!) lounging around on a little concrete mini pier that stretched out onto the loch. Lovely....

I'm not sure exactly what made this holiday so brilliant but I was ridiculously relaxed and happy for a whole nine days, just loving milling about, enjoying the scenery and taking each day as it came. The fresh air was a great bonus too! When we stepped off the train in Glasgow, we looked at each other with wrinkled up noses and said, "Glasgow smells really bad!" I've got used to it again already. It doesn't take long to become accustomed to the stench, I guess...

I did it! I finished blogging about my holiday! Hooray! Normal random little blog posts will recommence shortly :)