Hello Comrie

Today we travelled the 420 miles from home to Comrie in Perthshire, out holiday place for the week. We had an excellent journey stopping at Gretna Green for our picnic lunch and arriving at about 2:45pm. It turned out to be the last day of the Comrie Fortnight. We were too late to see the float parade, but we caught up with them later at Laggan Park.

We were staying at the delightful Rennie Mackintosh Retreat...

Here are a few photos.

We were welcomed with a bottle of wine and some lemon melts.

This is the upstairs kitchen and living area. The bedrooms are downstairs.

We were just across the road from the iconic White Church, now the community centre.

Here is the renowned fish&chips.. and source of our evening meal.

We were also close to the bridge over the River Earn. On the river we saw some goosanders, aka common mergansers. Here's one of them.

Out the kitchen window we had a view of the Melville Monument, which we will climb up to later in the week

There are plenty of independent shops - greengrocers, bakers, butchers, and 3 convenience stores so we had plenty of shopping close at hand. Here is the Goldfinch Gallery.

It was being minded by the daughter of one of the artists - they live just a few doors down the street, She told us about the Charity Day at Drummond Castle Gardens, which we were already planning on visiting, but will do tomorrow afternoon to catch the festivities (and cheap entry).

At the far end of the village we saw people coming in the other direction, including children clutching bags of candyfloss. Crossing the river Lednock we came to Laggan Park at the entrance to the golf club. No cricket today, but the Comrie Fortnight festival finale. Here we saw an alternative to tossing the caber I hadn't seen before.

A lot of people were dressed in costumes.

There was also an exhibition of vintage cars...

 

...and the floats. The cemetery one was our favourite with its entertaining tombstone engravings, including Ima Goner, Anita Shovel, Myra Mains and, my favourite, Izzy Deadyet.

We stopped at the Royal Hotel next door for a start of holiday drink.

Just as we were finishing our fish&chip and haggis suppers from the fish&chip shop, we heard the sound of bagpipes and found the Comrie Pipe Band in the square round the corner (where I had parked my car) in front of the Royal Hotel. They are rather good and we loved the Strathearn tartan they wear.

Here is a video clip.

What a great start to our holiday!

You can see more of my photos from today and more videos of the Comrie Pipe Band in action here on Flickr.