We had a great weekend away in Mull. The Salen Hotel was the perfect choice for a group. The rooms were lovely, the food was fine and the staff were extremely friendly. There was a pool table, a juke box and two bars – what more could one ask for? If that was not enough, they even organised a cab in the form of a mini-bus to take us all into Tobermory for dinner one night. We were dropped off at one pub for dinner, and picked up at another after (a few!) drinks. Perfect.

I understand the hillwalking went fine. There are a variety of graphs and charts available for those of you who want to reduce the lovely walk up a hill on a sunny day to a series of numbers and figures and percentages, but for the rest, suffice to say it didn’t rain, no-one got injured, the champagne at the top of the hill was quaffable and the whisky was a brilliant idea! Robert has officially completed all 284 Munros in Scotland, and Karen & Colin have now completed their first. We’re all extremely lucky to have had such dry weather on Mull in February, and even luckier that there was no snow or worse, ice, at the top of Ben More.

Even Maddie & I had an enjoyable day, albeit at the bottom of the hill. We were heading for a walk to the Carsaig Arches, but were delayed en-route to spend some time with a local farmer who was supplementing his animals food by stopping and giving food to all his sheep, cows and highland ponies. I’ve never seen sheep gunning it down the road at the sound of a car horn tooting. Most disconcerting! We did however, manage a little walking. We headed off to see Mackinnons Cave, although had we managed to make it past all the deep, thick mud on the farm before reaching the cliffs, we would have found out that the tide was too high for us to enter the cave anyway…. never mind, we used our wits to get around the mud, and we had a short walk along the cliff with wonderful views out to the Island of Staffa before heading back to Craignure to pick up Dave who was on the 12.45pm ferry. Being 3 Aussies alone on Mull in the afternoon, we ventured off to visit Macquarie’s Mausoleum where we were advised quite specifically that Macquarie had earnt the title ‘Father of Australia’ from his 12 years in Sydney as Governor. Imagine finding out that Mr Macquarie, after whom the bank, the university, the street and a variety of other spots & businesses were named, was actually born on Mull. Small world huh?

(pictures will follow, probably tomorrow…)

That done. We’re back in Glasgow and looking forward to 6 full weeks before heading away again, this time to Pakistan. There may be the odd few days now and again when Michelle will zip off to France for business, but all in all we’re grounded here in an attempt to save some cash to cover our trip to Pakistan. I’m quite happy about it, if only I could stop reading the travel sections of the Saturday & Sunday papers!

Netball this afternoon, oh joy! Pakistan embassy tomorrow…