Summer holiday part deux ...

It seems amazing to think I've been back working for a week already and returned to the office in Helsinki today.

After our return from the mökki, we visited Helsinki's zoo on Friday and then flew on Sunday to Edinburgh, via Heathrow. We started with a couple of nights in Edinburgh, staying at the Haymarket area, in easy walk to the city centre. We packed in a lot - an open top bus tour, visit to the Edinburgh Dungeon, some shopping on Prince's Street, a craft market and a walk through Grassmarket and around the castle area. We didn't manage to get tickets to any of the fringe comedy festival but picked up the buzz around the city.

We then crossed the Forth Road Bridge and travelled to Stirling Castle, thence to Perth (shown on the picture) for an overnight stay and a visit the following day to Scone Palace, the original home of the stone of destiny.

From there, we visited Scotland's oldest working distillery at Glenturret, which dates back to 1775. Unlike the visits recently to Guinness and Jameson in Dublin, this place is still preparing the water of life (the word whisky is derived from the Scottish Gaelic words of that meaning, uisge beatha) in a process virtually unchanged in more than 200 years. Glenturret single malt is one of the whiskies that go into the Famous Grouse, so we had the tour and were pretty impressed.

After this, a couple of days of chilling out were called for. We stayed in Drymen, on the shores (or is that the bonnie, bonnie banks) of Loch Lomond. Though all of the scenery we saw in Scotland was beautiful (helped, of course, by the sunshine), this was perhaps the most spectacular, the largest body of freshwater in the UK (by surface area, Loch Ness is smaller but has more volume).

We flew home on the Friday, after a visit to Hopetoun House, Scotland's finest stately home, then went to Ladies Day at Newbury Races on Saturday with friends. Unusually, we came out ahead of the bookies on that occasion, a very enjoyable day.

So now it is back to work. Hopefully when I feel stressed, a look at the photos will remind me of the tranquility of the Scottish countryside and reduce my blood pressure a little.