Back from hols

We got back from Spain in very good time on Sunday. The upside of a fairly early start was that we were all back home in Inverurie and Banchory by lunchtime. It wasn't even too much of a shock weather-wise either - it's been fairly pleasant autumnal weather here since we returned.

I went out for a couple of bike rides on Monday and Tuesday and then on Wednesday I drove back over to Inverurie to pick up Luca and bring him over to Banchory for the last 3 days of the school holidays.

When we were in Spain, Gary had put his car in for service/MoT and he got the bad news when he was away that his car was a write-off. Gary wasn't surprised at this and didn't seem too fazed by it either - he said he would buy another one easily enough. Nonetheless, I was a little surprised to see this in his driveway so soon:

Yes - it's a Jag. It may be 15 years old but seems, externally at least, to be in decent nick.

Luca arrived with his Play Station, of course, so we set it up and let him play with it on Wednesday afternoon. Today (Thursday), after a slow morning, we decided it would be good to get out for a decent walk. There was shopping to be done so we took bags with us and headed to Morrison's - via the Platties, of course - Luca's favourite riverside spot.

Finished shopping, Jo suggested we pop in to Duncan's new store and visit their coffee shop before we headed home. Nice enough place but we felt their outside space was a lot better than inside. The ginger cake was very good, however.

I then suggested we take a slightly circular route home via the new Banchory Sports Village as I wanted to enquire about booking the sports hall there for another game of walking football - something we'd only tried once before last Xmas Eve. Not sure I got the answers to the queries I asked, but I left with a sheaf of leaflets and membership forms anyway. We couldn't believe that there was hardly anyone in the new pool in the middle of the school holidays?

So that's it so far this week. Tomorrow I've got one of our monthly hill-walks scheduled. This time, it's a simple riverside walk over in the Edzell area with not much climbing, I believe.

Going off at a bit of a tangent, a photo I picked up from the Banchory Heritage Society Facebook page might be of interest to those, like me, who have only known Banchory since the early 1980's. I'd never seen a photo before of the old railway bridge across the North Deeside road just past the junction with Corsee Road, looking west:

It looks completely different doesn't it? You can even see the dip in the road that used to flood with water when they had a lot of rain - but the dip was necessary as otherwise timber lorries etc couldn't pass under the bridge as it was slightly too low. Judging by the big crane that's there, this must have been when they were taking the bridge down - some time after 1966 when the line was closed down in the wake of the Beeching cuts, first announced in 1963.