Lexie hates leaving home.  She refuses to come with me in the car for the short ride into Lochinver to do shopping or post parcels, whereas Peggy will jump into the car at any opportunity.   Sometimes she simply sits in my car all day, as it is warm, out of the wind and rain, and it means she can see what is going on and if something needs investigating she can simply hop out of the car and investigate.  Lexie, like Stevan, likes to be at home.  But ...... she does enjoy a mini holiday.  So when Stevan announced that he had to be in Callander for a meeting this weekend I suggested that we all go, get out the tent, and have a camping weekend.

Friday morning found us all in the car heading down the A9 to Callander, stopping briefly at the campsite just long enough to erect our tent in what we hoped was a quiet corner of the campsite.



We certainly had a lovely view:



By the time we reached the Perthshire/Stirlingshire border, the temperature had rocketed and it was a beautifully sunny day.  Given the country had snow flurries about 10 days ago it was surprising that it could be so warm all of a sudden.  After dropping Stevan off at his conference the dogs and I went exploring Callander.  It's not a big town, but the centre is very pretty with the river Teith running through the centre of the town.  We walked along the river for a while, enjoying the lovely spring growth on the avenue of trees:



On Saturday, while Stevan was sweating away in a hot, sticky meeting room, I had the freedom to go roaming.  First stop off point was Lake of Monteith, where you can call for the ferry to take you across to the Priory on an island in the loch.  I declined to do this, though, as it was simply too hot to leave the dogs in the car for 5 minutes, let alone an hour or so.  The water looked invitingly cool:



From there we drove on to Aberfoyle, where I managed to find some shady parking and so I made my way into the Scottish Sheep Centre to find some shorts!  However I had to stop to capture these two sheep that seemed intent on getting indoors, out of the intense heat:



From Aberfoyle we made our way up the steep, twisty, turny road that heads back towards Callander, as I intended to make my way to Crieff to see somebody.  However we got waylaid.  We serendipitously found the David Marshall Lodge.   Now normally I don't go for "organised fun", but I have to say that the "Go Ape" programme that is run here definitely appealed!!   If Stevan had been with me I would definitely have suggested we take it in turns to dog sit while we took part in the 3 hour programme which included a zip wire 40m off the ground:





That is very high!

I'm off to bed now - it's exam week for Stevan this week, so we all need our beauty/brains sleep.  More of our mini-holiday soon.