Rambling Russells

Friday 14th Dec A lovely sunny day saw us off on another trip - this time to Stirling. The weather forecast for tomorrow is looking very hairy - warnings are out for snow, ice and rain! - but today is glorious. On the way we bypassed the Kelpies and then Stirling Castle. After a slight detour - through Morrisons car park - we finally found our hotel, which looked out over the Wallace Monument. Saturday 15th Dec Well it didn't look too bad when we looked out the window this morning so we decided to go to the Visitor Centre at the Queen Elizabeth Park at Aberfoyle. The approach road had more snow than we had seen so far … and the loch definitely looked icy … There was supposed to be a craft fair but unfortunately we found only 2 stalls! After coffee we therefore headed back to Stirling, but were rewarded on the way out by fabulous stags running through the trees! We have been know to say on occasions "You just never know what you might see!...

Friday 9th Nov. We began our trip at the usual meeting place outside Edinburgh - free coffee Mon - Fri! We then moved on to South Queensferry - the car park just outside gives a lovely view of the bridge. Going into the village itself there was a museum all about the bridges on the main street. What a quaint little place - narrow street with steps up to shops above street level. Having spent some time in the museum we had a wander up and down the street before finding a nice cafe for refreshments. Moving on we crossed the new bridge - busy by this time in the afternoon - to our hotel for the next few days. Sat 10th Nov Sat saw us catching the train from Markinch to Dundee. Ticket office out of action and we were asked if we had our bus passes with us??? There is apparently a special rate for train users if you have a bus pass in Fife. As we did not have a Fife bus pass it was no good to us. The platform taking people to Edinburgh was very busy as there was a ...

A place we had heard of, but never got around to visiting, was Broom Fisheries, near Annan. Well, the weather was perfect this morning - frosty but sunny - so a wander was in order. We knew where we were going but had never been down this particular road before! A narrow, winding  road took us through the old Royal Ordnance Factory site before arriving at Broom Fisheries. Broom Fisheries it turns out is the home to coarse fishing lakes and waters at Newbie, just 2 miles from Annan in beautiful Dumfries & Galloway. The fishery is open from 8am to dusk every day. You may ask - as we did - what is coarse fishing? As I understand it (I think!) coarse fishing is fishing for species of fish that live in freshwater - other than trout and salmon. Broom Fisheries offer the chance to catch barbel, roach, tench, perch, bream, rudd, gudgeon, chub, carp and ide. (Never even heard of ide!) They have records of bream and barbel weighing in at 6lbs and carp at 15lbs! Coarse fishing ...

Day 1 Telling everyone we were off to Washington caused a few questions, but we were only travelling to the North East of England, not across the Atlantic! We were going to visit a museum that many ex NE residents seemed to have no knowledge of!! The North East Land, Sea and Air Museum (formerly the North East Aircraft Museum)is an aviation museum situated on the site of the former RAF Usworth and Sunderland Airport, at Washington. The museum also has collections of weaponry, vehicles, engines and other historical exhibits. Many of the exhibits are housed in a new hangar, much of the money for which was donated by members of the public. The museum has a collection of more than 30 aircraft - from passenger aircraft to training planes ... and a huge Vulcan. It is only when you are up close you realise just how big it is! The Military Vehicle Museum  has a collection of military vehicles such as trucks and armored personnel carriers. There are also examples of emerge...

On the eve of our holiday, as we were packing cases, an Email arrived to say our ferry had been cancelled because of a technical issue (unable to use ramp to get cars on or off)!! Unable to get through to Calmac because of the high volume of calls they were experiencing we went to bed not knowing what would happen in the morning. Well morning arrived and although the website said there was an extra ferry running - it was at 8 o'clock in the morning! Not going to catch that one then! Ringing Calmac resulted in about an hour on hold. Eventually, talking to a very helpful assistant meant we changed our booking to the first available ferry - at 8pm. Plans to meet our fellow travellers then had to change, and kept changing throughout the day. Finally arriving at the ferry terminal to collect our tickets we found that our original ferry might be taking cars after all! A mad dash to get the cars into the queue and we managed to board the ferry at the very last minute. Back to Plan ...