Jen and Rebecca Follow the Random Brown Signs

R: Jen and I were again happy with our hotel choice. While not a free Hilton again, our Oban hotel upgraded us to the family suite, for some reason, so we each had a giant room to ourselves with our own giant TVs and our own nice views of the harbor and town. Plus, as an added bonus, the towel heater in the bathroom worked! Once we tore ourselves away from our awesome rooms and BBC’s morning show, we wandered through Oban where every moment had us guessing about whether it would continue to rain all day or not. Enticed by the brown sign saying that the coliseum-like McCaig’s Tower was only a half-mile away, our steep climb would have been more pleasant without the rain. But the walk back down sans rain psyched us up for a visit to the Oban Chocolate company for hot chocolate.

J: I’d hate to say that the hot chocolate was the highlight of my day, but there is something to be said for cocoa made with fresh chocolate. Today turned into a day of “what does that brown sign say? Want to go there?” It started with an abandoned priory outside of Oban. It offered up some lovely lake views and photos of church ruins. It was only a mildly stressful for Rebecca to drive down a single-track road. She was much happier once we arrived for lunch at a little café overlooking Castle Stalker. And, so was I because I was once again lulled into thinking it had stopped raining again. Silly me.

R: Castles sitting alone on tiny islands are pretty cool. We managed to make the short walk to the castle viewpoint without precipitation, but good thing we didn’t linger!

R: Onward to the village of Glencoe, a one-street town nestled between the monros and hills. We first stopped at the Folk Museum which, as one of the other visiting American tourists noted, looks a lot like an antique shop with its odd collection of old things. But there was a nice display of implements needed to card and then knit wool over the years, plus some old Victorian dresses complete with a description of proper dance etiquette that was pretty interesting too.

J: There was a small display on the Glencoe Massacre at the museum and we followed up our history lesson with a viewing of the Massacre Monument a few minutes later. We finished off our time in Glencoe with a short forest walk around one of the many lochs in the Highlands. We had been debating whether or not to take the short, easy hike (the lake route) or the longer, steeper hike to the top of the mountain, but when it started to pour rain again, we decided that we had, indeed, made the right choice.

R: Seeing another brown sign just down the road, we stopped again for another wee bit of a hike around the old slate quarry in Ballachulish as it continued to rain on us. (Hooray for hoods!) We soon arrived in our overnight town of Fort William where we easily found our B&B conveniently located an easy walk into the town center had some Tex-Mex and cask ales from the Grog and Gruel.

Rainbow over Fort William

J: Another perk of our morning walk through Oban was the purchase of a road atlas. Now that we’re in the Highlands, there are significantly fewer roundabouts and turn options even available, but we feel much more secure with an honest-to-goodness map in the car—plus it includes markers for fun road-side attractions that we’ve already started to add to our agenda for the next several days.