Falkirk Wheel

Today was our last full day in Scotland.  Tomorrow we will be leaving the Drum Farm B&B and heading back to Edinburgh.  We'll drop off our car at the Europcar facility in Edinburgh, then head to the train station.  Once on the train we will be riding a to London and staying at a Holiday Inn near the Heathrow Airport. On Wednesday we fly back to Tampa on Virgin Atlantic.

We did see some pretty cool stuff on our last day.  The first thing was the Falkirk Wheel. It is the world's only rotating boat lift.  It connects the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal.  The wheel raises (or lowers) boats by 79 ft.  It would take a lot of verbiage to explain the Wheel, so I'm just going to post a YouTube video.  We were able to ride one of the boats and the Wheel lifted us up to the upper canal. The engineering behind it is amazing.






We also visited some horses called the Kelpies. They aren't real horses, but 98 ft horse-head sculptures depicting kelpies (shape-shifting water spirits).  They are built of structural steel with a stainless steel cladding.  They weigh 300 tons each.



At night the horses are lit.  Note: I didn't take this picture, but got it from the Internet.
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We finished up the day visiting the Doune Castle.  It is a medieval stronghold near the village of Doune. The castle was originally built in the thirteenth century, then damaged in the Scottish Wars of Independence, before being rebuilt in its present form in the late 14th century by Robert Stewart, Duke of Albany.  I was excited to visit the castle because it was the main castle that was used in filming the movie "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".  In addition, it was used to film various scenes in the Outlander series on Starz and Game of Thrones on HBO.






  

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