The weather wasn’t bad for driving and, after a trip to Tesco for The Times and some nappies, we were on the road. I had suggested to Tim that we go to St Andrews since I knew it had quite a golfing history and Tim had never been there. Tim took the front seat and performed the duties of navigator and quickly earned himself the name Tim Tim (after Tom Tom - the popular GPS navigation system found on many PDAs). The drive was fairly long but we made it with only a few minor detours.
Lou didn’t realise the significance of this place for Tim but soon found out that it is the birthplace of golf and Tim was quite excited about visiting it. We popped into the local tourist information centre and picked up a great map of the highlights of St Andrews. We walked down towards the water in the direction of the ruins of the Cathedral of St Andrew which was destroyed during the Reformation and subsequent stone robbing. We had our lunch inside the grounds and wandered around the ruins and the accompanying graveyard.
We walked around the coastline road past the equally picturesque ruins of St Andrews Castle to the famous Old Course. It was like holy ground for Tim and he pointed out the famous bridge on the 17th hole where the winners have their photos taken. Tim was reluctant to go out on the course but after a while I managed to talk him into it and I took three great shots of him on the bridge which he said “made his year for him”.
We needed to get a move on so Tim Tim navigated our way to Glamis castle, the childhood home of the Queen Mother. Glamis is a beautiful castle with a lovely tree-lined driveway, little chairs where the Queen sat with her sister when they visited with their grandparents, and turrets like a Disney fantasy palace. There was talk of a ghost but we were fortunate enough to not witness its presence.
After leaving Glamis we had a long drive to Inverness in front of us. The winding roads had a very familiar feel to it and the scenery was very much like driving through New Zealand. Will was getting bored on the long journey so Lou recorded herself singing ‘It’s a Small World” on my cell phone which Will learned how to operate quickly and played over to himself for the last half hour of the journey. We drove past several things we would have lived to visit but we were running short of time; namely Blair Castle and the Dalwhinnie distillery.
We arrived at our beautiful accommodation on the banks of the River Ness then went to get some Indian takeaways for dinner along the road. While waiting for it to be ready, we stepped into The Whiskey Shop for a couple of free tastings where a knowledgeable young man told us heaps about the local whiskeys. We took our dinner back to the Moray Park Lodge before having a relatively early night.
