Scotland Day 15 and 16 and homeward bound

 Sunday was our last full day in Scotland. After breakfast and short but poignant goodbyes, we loaded on the ferry and drove almost straight through to Edinburgh.  We had just enough time to check out two other attractions.

 The Falkirk Wheel

Three shots of the Falkirk Wheel rotating to exchange boats from one canal to another.

The Falkirk Wheel is “an engineering marvel” built in 2003 to connect two large canals. It replaced 29 locks that had been decommissioned decades ago.  One rotation of the wheel lifts a boat up from the small lake at the end of one canal to the aerial portion at the end of the other canal. Quite cool to watch.

 The Kelpies

A few miles away, connected by paved paths alongside the lower canal are The Kelpies, metal sculptures of horseheads standing almost 90 feet high. One of the other wedding guests said he didn’t think The Kelpies were worth the short detour off the freeway. I completely disagree! They are really, really cool! 

We got lucky with the sun and clouds - made for beautiful pictures.

A close up showing the metal structure of the sculpture.

 

The mane.

The inside of one Kelpie

Look how huge they are!  That is me standing under the head.

I'm really glad we stopped to check out The Kelpies.

The Kelpies visit made for a beautiful evening to end our tour of Scotland.

 We checked in to our hotel by the airport for a little bit of rest before flying home the next day.

The hotel had tiny eclairs waiting for us. Coffee creamer cup for scale.

Cheers to you, Scotland!

Day 16 return

I had a 3 am wakeup call for my 6 am flight to Paris. Because of thick ground fog in Paris, we were not allowed to take off until 7:45 am, making my 70-minute connection in Paris unlikely. My personal travel agent husband was attempting to fly standby from Edinburgh to Newark, so I was on my own. Luckily, Delta held the Paris to SLC flight for me and several others and my checked luggage even made the connect.  By 3 pm I was back home and Drew followed 6 hours later. 

That wraps up a fantastic trip! My take-aways for our Scotland adventure: friendly people, easy to navigate, surprisingly good food (I had heard otherwise but never had a bad meal, even at the truck stop), beautiful rugged mountains covered by grass and moss, not very many people, interesting skies with always a pretty cloud to make for amazing photographs, rain of multiple types at all time of the day lasting from 5 minutes to 5 hours, OK mountain biking but not what we expected, game trails turned into hiking trails, quite affordable, and loads and loads of history on display. I am content to have visited by ancestors' homeland.  Goodbye, Scotland!