This morning, our last day to travel as a group, we had to take a short walk to get to the coach. It was the last opportunity for Peter to tell us to ‘boonch up’ as we crossed a busy street, and it was a little sad to think that this was the last time we would hear that gentle command.

It was a fairly long ride today, about two hours, as we traveled west to Loch Lomond just outside Glasgow. Again, the countryside is covered with neat gentle hills and farms; but Peter explained that forty years ago much of the area was heavily industrialized with factories and mines and that the land had subsequently been reclaimed for agriculture.

As we drove west we were a little concerned about the weather; the temperature was pleasantly cool but the skies were overcast and threatening. We’d had very good weather for the entire time, except for one dreichy day at Stratford-upon-Avon, and we all hoped that the rains would hold off for one more day.

Shortly before reaching Balmaha on the banks of Loch Lomond, we participated in another group sing. We had some very good voices on board, but folks at the front and rear of the coach kept singing at different tempos. The net effect was rather strange–it sounded as though we were singing a round. Naturally the song we sang was “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond”, which sounds like a hauntingly sweet song about a lost love, but there is a little more to it than that. It was supposedly written by an anonymous soldier who died while imprisoned during the Jacobite rebellion.

The weather improved when we reached the loch, and we had some nice views, although the peak Ben Lomond remained stubbornly cloud covered. Most of us took a walk along the shore of the loch, but Fred disappointed us by refusing to wade in the lake as he had so bravely done in the Irish Sea at Llandudno. Even so, we could at least claim that we took a hike in the Scottish highlands.

We then had a lunch of sandwiches at the David Marshall Information Center, followed by a gentle stroll to a pretty, near-by waterfall, known as the Little Fawn Waterfall.

Our next activity was a boat ride on Loch Katrine, where we were supposed to sail on the steamship ‘Sir Walter Scott’. The skipper announced, however, that the engineer showed up drunk–staggering like he was on the North Sea. Since we couldn’t go out in the big boat without an engineer, we sailed on the smaller ‘Lady of the Lake’ instead. The rain continued to stay away, but the wind was strong and chilly, especially as we sailed out into the lake, and we had a bunch of sissies who stayed below in the enclosed cabin. They probably never realized that two of our group, Sharon and Jon, took turns driving the boat. Their only instructions from the skipper was, “Keep us off the grass.”

We made good time getting back to the hotel in Edinburgh, and along the way Peter brought up the ten quintessentially British things that he presented to us nearly two weeks earlier.

Ten Quintessentially British things
• Real ale
• Fish and chips
• Ridges and furrows
• Field boundaries
• Castle or abbey
• Village pub, church, thatch
• British sport
• Cooked breakfast
• Royal family
• Narrow, twisty, windy roads

There was considerable debate about which items should be replaced by what other quintessentially British things, but I lost track of what we decided. Actually, it probably didn’t matter because I don’t think Peter was going to change his mind–even though we all know that ‘Driving on the wrong side of the road’ should be on the list.

We had our final group dinner at the hotel and then followed this with our ‘Farewell Do’. Ros gave a quick overview of all the different things we had seen and done in the past 18 days. It was really sort of amazing when everything was put in such a short summary but perhaps the most surprising was that we had traveled 1670 road miles on the bus–Rats! make that coach. Peter then completed the program with a short slide show of group photos taken along the route. We all then said our sweet/sad goodbyes to our fellow adventurers, knowing that we would probably never meet again, and returned to our rooms to prepare for the long trip home in the morning.