Day 7- Largs to Dalry to Glen Coe

On the morning of Day 7, we drove from Largs to meet up with Gavin's distant cousin Jim Archibald, a retired dairy farmer to tour his farm near the town of Dalry.  Jim met us at "The Cross" in front of St. Margarets Church in Dalry at 9:00 AM and we followed him to his cattle farm just down the road.  There, Gavin's distant cousin Robert Gillan, also a local retired dairy farmer, met us and we walked around Jim's farm together.  Jim gave us a personal tour- showing us his old barn where the cows would come inside to eat and be milked- a process that took place every day of the year at 5:30 AM in the morning before the milk truck (and before that the milk train) would show up to take the milk to Glasgow for pasteurization and bottling.  Although Jim is retired, he has not stopped working.  His barn is immaculate.  

Jim then pulled his truck around for us to hop in and we all rode to his pond to look at the tree planting effort he started 7 years ago.  Jim has planted hundreds of trees around a pond that has formed in an old clay quarry.  Jim quizzed Gavin on his tree species and Gavin got a few right, including coastal redwood and the rare dawn redwood from China, which Gavin had a home advantage on being from Redwood City where both trees are planted side by side near the library.  Jim has introduced well over a hundred trees including western cedar, sitka spruce, weeping willows and many more. Departing the farm, Robert passed along his map of Scotland, a thoughtful gift that has since come in quite handy.

Leaving Dalry, Largs, and the Archbald family history portion of the trip behind, we headed northwest, across the River Clyde, along Loch Lomond, then left the larger highways to take something of a back road to Oban.  The route got greener, lusher, wetter and more spectacular the further we went.  We stopped to stretch our legs at one point and realized that there were ancient standing stones right across the street.  We hurried to the field to walk among the sheep and standing stones!  Wow!  What a pleasant surprise!  Oh Scotland...

As we arrived in Oban around 5:00 PM, we found ourselves to be a bit underwhelmed.  The town was a fine ferry/port town, but not exactly what we were looking for- so we drove on, North.  We were starting to get a bit overwhelmed with the amount of driving we had done for the day and restless at this point, so we decided it was time to find a place to stay for the night.  After passing a ton of B&B's that had no vacancies and a few guest houses that were too gloomy, we stumbled upon a hotel on the water of Loch Linnhe.  It was dark out, so we were not sure what we were surrounded by, but they had vacancies, a sauna and heated pool and a nice/modern room- so we took it.  We unpacked our bags, had a fine dinner and went to bed for the evening.

Little did we know, we had stumbled upon a major gem of Scotland.  More on that in Day 8...