We decided to take a trip to the coastal town of Oban, although we had been there many years ago, we figured it was time for another visit.
The Day started off fine (for this part of the world, I define “fine” as bucketing down with rain, but not to the extent that you can’t see the car in front of you).
We have a Renault Hybrid rental, I didn’t realise it was a hybrid when we picked it up, so I spent 10 minutes trying to start the engine!! I HATE this car, it may be better if we had an instruction book. It plays sounds with no explanation, it tries to keep you in lane with its auto steering, but fails. When you steer manually to keep the car on the road it flashes messages to you saying KEEP CONTROL OF THE CAR!!…. any way back to the blog.
We wandered around Oban for a while and had lunch. Above Oban is McCaig’s folly, a reproduction of the Colosseum in Rome.
The scenery here is fantastic, unfortunately (my) pictures don’t do it justice, but I’ll put a few below.
As we left Oban, there was a traffic sign saying there was an accident close to Spean Bridge with a delay of 20 minutes. We figured we were a couple of hours away, so it shouldn’t be an issue. The GPS gave us an alternate route as we got closer, but it only took us through Fort William High Street, by-passing the bypass!!. We got onto the main road, a ten minute drive to Spean Bridge.We left Fort William at 3PM. Although it was slow, all was OK until we got to a round-a-bout, after exiting there was a sign ROAD CLOSED. Why put it after the round-a-bout when there was no where to go?? No diversion signs ….nothing. Lyn knew of a possible country road (track) route, so we tried that. To cut a very long story short, the road was single track with passing places. With coaches, large trucks and no police to help out it was carnage. This was made worse when a lorry (truck) went off the road and closed it as well!!
The 10 minute journey took 4 hours!!! Apart from lack of any official help in controlling the traffic, the main issue was the fact that the local police did not have the authority to investigate an accident if there were injuries. A special unit had to drive in, and they were 2 hours away, assuming they were available. The main road was closed for over six hours.
The only good part was the scenery again.
We even caught a rare glimpse of the elusive “Ben Nevis”. This is the highest Mountain in the UK at 4003ft.
The evening finished with a “few” drinks for birthday celebrations.