There Can Only Be One... post about the Highlands

That title, of course, being totally untrue since there is a post about them below this one. Anyway.

So as I said before we got a bus tour that took up a very large portion of the day (8.30 - 19.00/7:00p) and took us first to the William Wallace Monument. It was a really tall castle-looking spire on top of a pretty high hill that had a winding spiral staircase to the top and contained the actual sword of William Wallace. (which, by the way, is gigantic and it said he had to be at least 6'6" to even wield it!) The view from the top was awesome. Little did we know that we had not even begun to see awesome views of Scotland yet... (and remember, always click my pictures to enlarge!)

After the monument we headed up to Aberfeldy and got a really delicious big lunch. Scottish beef is amazing, the best beef I've ever eaten. All our dishes were excellent. We got back on the tour bus and were kind of late since the restaurant took a little bit too long for our time limit but everybody had to eat there because it was the only food place open on a sunday in the town (ha!). We got to Dewar's Whisky Distillery and had to take an abridged version of the tour, so we saw a video and looked at the exhibits but then skipped the actual walk into the distillery part and went strait to the whisky tasting. I don't drink so of course that wasn't really a big deal, but I had a sip of my dram anyway since I took the tour.

From there we started a long but increasingly beautiful drive into the Highlands. For the rest of the trip the scenery just got more and more beautiful as we went north. We stopped at a viewpoint to look out to some mountains, stopped again at a the Falls of Dochard (picture right) which was awesome, stopped at a Yew tree that is older then humanity (5,000 years, second oldest living organism on the planet - I took a piece of it haha) and then stopped at Falls of Falloch (or, "Rob Roy's Bathtub", below) which totally trumped Dochard.

After the falls we drove all around Loch Lomond which is quite possibly the most beautiful place I've ever seen. My only regret for the day is we did not get off the bus here, and there were so many trees I was not able to get any real good pictures but it was amazing. A 40 km lake that is just giant sitting surrounded by giant wooded mountains and the colors are just unbelievably vibrant. Really, all the colors in Scotland are crazy saturated and vibrant. There are these yellow and blue flowers that grow everywhere and just make the hills glow unreal colors, and I have already forgotten their names.

We lastly drove through a conserved old village that looked out of a story book where you can actually rent a house on holiday, it was really cool. We got back at 19.00 to Glasgow and then... well... ate at a McDonalds before going back to the Hostel for our bags. (Yeah, I know... cheap and fast though!) We got our tickets from the booth and the guy gave us 20 quid back because of a sale we did not get to take advantage of online, so that was awesome! We got the train to Edinburgh which is just under and hour and... I'll make that a seperate post. This is alll about the Highlands.