Today, I set off for Maclean, the Scottish town!

It lives up to its name in various ways; tartan patterns are painted on the power poles, many signs are written in both English and Scottish Gaelic, and it even has a cairn.

Check out these power poles:

These are only two of the many that are painted around the town.  And this sign has the promised two languages:

My first stop was the lookout, at the top of a steep hill.  There was a very nice view – it was a gorgeous day!

Descending from the lookout, I stopped at a place called Pinnacle Rocks – it had a nice view of the town and the river:

I really like views that show you towns as well as landscapes.  I’m not sure why – the contrast, maybe?

The pinnacle that gives the place its name:

Now it’s time for a geology lesson!  For those who don’t care how those rocks got there, just skip the next paragraph (and endure my silent judgement).

This is Cretaceous-Jurassic sandstone overlaying siltstone.  The hard sandstone over the soft siltstone often causes major landslips, and that’s what created Pinnacle Rocks.  A landslip caused part of the cliff to break away and slide downhill, and while some of the cliff line collapsed into a pile of large boulders, part of the cliff slid intact, without collapsing, producing the pinnacle.

It’s weird to think that thing isn’t stacked boulders but a whole section of cliff that just slid away.

There were some birds around the pinnacle – the zoom on my camera managed to grab these two Dollarbirds:

Those are some pretty funny-sounding calls, right?

I filmed what I thought was a kookaburra, but turned out to be a Sacred Kingfisher:

It’s hard to see without scales, but you can tell it has a much slimmer build than a kookaburra.  Speaking of which, some of them were around the place – I could hear them, and managed to get a photo of this pair:

This is probably a mated pair – kookaburras mate for life.

I also filmed a Brown Gerygone:

Then I set off for the museum.  Like the usual historical museum, it had lots of artefacts donated by the townspeople, and I got some interesting photos:

A collection of little artefacts that I just found interesting:

Look at the tiny anvil they used for bike chains!

Then I moved onto the stone cottage – built between 1879-1889.  The stone was quarried locally, and it’s rather pretty:

I entered through the laundry:

I’ve been in a lot of these historical houses, but this is the first one that really felt like a place someone once lived in.  I’m not sure why – if the secret is in how they’ve arranged everything or how it’s designed or what, but this really felt like it had been a home.

Then I was off to see the cairn!

Those tiles around the base depict the symbol and motto of several Scottish clans.  I took photos of the most interesting ones:

The whole ‘touch not the cat’ seems to be a common thing.  I wonder why?  And I thought ‘dread god’ seemed very blunt.

Next to the cairn they had some poles painted in tartan colours.  These are the chief’s tartan poles – painted with the tartans of the chiefs who have ruled here since 1894.

Then it was time to head back to Turtle Shell.  I encountered a bit of frustration on the way back – a guy going 20km under the speed limit.  Usually, that doesn’t bother me (considering the speeds I take the caravan at, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to be irritated about someone taking it slow), but he would always speed up to over the limit whenever an overtaking lane appeared.  Why?

It was a hot day, so I indulged myself and bought a cheap ice cream from the caravan park shop.  I spotted a bearded dragon lurking around the shop, holding very still in the hope that I wouldn’t bother it.

Obviously I did bother it, enough to take a photo, but I left it alone after that.

Then I spent several hours trying to stop Firefox’s plugin container from consuming so much of my computer’s CPU.  Why so greedy, Firefox?  Sadly, all internet searches seemed to say one thing – ‘you’re screwed’ – so I surrendered to the inevitable and switched to Chrome.  You served me well for many years, Firefox, but in the end, your gluttonous appetite for my CPU was your undoing.

I’m not wild about Chrome – it doesn’t deal with tabbed browsing nearly as well as Firefox does – but it’s not maxing out my computer’s processing power at regular intervals, so I have to go with the lesser of two evils.