Day 4 - Stirling

On top of the world....

 Tuesday 27th July 2010

So you may be bored of us talking about the Lake District and so to listen to reader demand (all 2 of you) we will move on north of the border to a country called Scotland. Scotland is famous for all kinds of things...thistles, whisky and haggis. Oh they have a monster as well in a big lake...but we didn't see that either. While in this humble Shiltonpigs opinion Edinburgh is the best UK city, Stirling would be a candidate for the best town (and yes before you all email me, we know that Stirling is a city, but we will ignore what the Queen did in 2002)

Come on wave back...you know you want to..

Stirling is such a great place and this is the second time we have visited here. First up was the Wallace Monument which is a 19th century huge tower of like a zillion steps high to celebrate William Wallace.If you don't know who he is then I suggest you go and watch Braveheart the film with Mel Gibson. Mel wasn't here today, but there is a cache at the bottom of the hill with fine views of the hills nearby. Of course it would have been rude not to climb to the top of the tower and so with little Josh in our hands (well to be precisely Mrs Shiltonpigs hands as poor old Mr Shiltonpig seemed to suffer with an aversion to heights).

Josh didn't want to pose

 In the afternoon we headed over to the centre of city to find more caches...there are not that many in the centre...Josh and Mrs Shiltonpig had a little kip in the car while Mr Shiltonpig went to find a nearby cache and surprise surprise he bumped into the first geocachers of the holiday....Kernow Cachers. They had come up all the way from Cornwall...wow thats a long drive and then some. Between the 4 of us we tried to find the cache, but were only successful in finding a bees nest instead. Always nice to meet fellow cachers on ours travels. Headed back to the car to collect the tribe and wandered around the old town....one of the stranger caches we have done led

Josh aka Rob Roy

 us to a roundabout which was connected via a series of subways to find a nano on a noticeboard. It was actually nicer than it sounded. Josh seemed to like the caches that were near statues, he was able to climb up them (granted with some assistance). It is worth noting that he more than ever understands geocaching now. He knows that we look for boxes, its his job to open them and he looks through the toys while we sign the log book. He then puts the toys back and puts the box back...and he loves it. Were proud of our little geocacher!! Worth noting that we had a great curry in a pub here....a nice lamb bhuna. Travelodge provided us with a cheapish holiday this year...and so it provided us with a funny story in the hotel in the evening. At about 10.30 at night while Josh was asleep and Mr and Mrs Shiltonpig were enjoying a well deserved glass of wine, Mrs Shiltonpig noticed a drip in the ceiling. The drip became bigger and then another appeared and then another...until finally it was like a constant tap of water coming from the ceiling. It appears that a silly unsupervised 7 year old left alone in the room above us left the hot water tap and flooded the bathroom. Its bad enough that it has been raining everyday so far on this holiday without the fact it is now raining indoors!

The biggest drip of them all