It was pissing down when we left Glasgow this morning. When I awoke I looked out of the window and saw people in coats with brollys, a very reliable indicator of rain. We got a cab to Europcar and collected our new Corsa. Julie drove and I navigated, using a combination of an Aldi road atlas and Google Maps. Our destination was a tiny place caller Duror, half way between Oban and Fort William. It too me a while to work out the best route to get there because the Argyle coast is very complicated. It looks like a normal county that has been torn to pieces and then thrown up into the air to land randomly. The region to the north west of Glasgow is all lochs, islands and peninsulas with a few small towns.
Leaving Glasgow along the M8 we crossed the Erskine Bridge (an impressive cable-stayed construction) and had a look at Dumbarton. Julie's brother Ian had lent us his Scottish National Trust cards, so we went to see Dumbarton Castle. It sits on a tall volcanic plug, like Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh, and has been a fort for fifteen hundred years. It's a steep climb up to the top, but the views over the Clyde and Dumbarton make it very worthwhile. The rain stopped and Scotland turned from monotone to colour once again, as though BBC 2 had just been switched on in 1965
The A82 took us up the side of Loch Lomond, the biggest freshwater lake in Britain. We stopped briefly at Luss, which is a small tourist trap village with a big coach park. At Tarbet we turned eat along the A83, and the landscape became much more mountainous and interesting. Basically it looked just like the Shortbread tins, we even saw some shaggy cows with big horns. The road took us all the way down Loch Fyne, which is an actual loch and not a made up place for selling fish. The sun shone and Scotland looked as it does in guide books, which is what we had come for. The road was very good, and Julie enjoyed the driving while I looked out of the window, an excellent division of labour.
All the villages have unusual names, many of them unpronounceable for a soft Southerner. My favourite was Lochgilphead, which was at the head of Loch Gilph, From there we headed north up the A812 to Oban, which is a small town but a major transport hub for the region. Being in a fishing port, a fishy dinner beckoned, and we chose the Fishouse restaurant. The food was superb, I had haddock chowder to start and seafood pasta as my main. Both were creamy with lots of tasty fish, I would highly recommend it!
From Oban it was just half an hour north up the coast to our next AirBnB in Duror, Tigh Bahn. Our room is about a quarter of the size of the last one, but is cozy and very colourful. We have smuggled in some excellent Merlot from Morrisons in Dumbarton, the perfect accompaniment to blogging.
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