I am Mark Pelletier, and since my mother - a Campbell - was born in Scotland, I have always wanted to visit. These pages describe the trip my wife Sue and I took in June 2001. We hope you enjoy sharing our pictures and report. You can visit our Pelletier Family home page to learn more about us and some of our other travels.

Welcome to our Scotland Tour pages, by far the largest travel report we've ever had. Because of the size, the report has been organized into this Introduction and 10 daily pages. Each of the eleven pages has a "journal" section as well as a number of pictures, shown as "thumbnails" on the right side. You can click any of these to get an enlarged view, which will replace the "journal" in the main window. Click the Scotland flag at the upper left to recall the journal at any time. Select the individual daily reports across the top of the journal.

Scotland is about the size of the state of Maine, and the graphic shows it's size in relation to Illinois. Nonetheless, we managed to travel over 1500 miles in 10 days! We rented a Ford Mondeo - about the size of a Taurus - a nice car but quite wide for a new "right-hand-drive" driver. That's how I got the the flat tire. It took about three days to learn where the front left of the car was!

For lodging, we had pre-purchased vouchers good at over 600 Bed-and-Breakfasts in Scotland. We just had to call one or two days before arrival - otherwise we were totally on our own schedule. The weather was fair, with two days of mostly rain; and mixed cloudy, sunny, rainy for the others - including two hailstorms! Scotland is at about 56 degrees latitude (vs. 42 degrees in Chicago) and since we were almost at the Spring equinox, the days were very long. The sun rose at 4:30 AM and set at 10 PM, with a long twilight, so we had lots of touring time each day.

The country is beautiful and uncrowded; the people are friendly and speak a reasonably familiar language. We highly recommend Scotland as a travel destination. We will certainly return!

So take a look at the shots of Loch Ness on the right (sorry, no monster sighted) then pick a day and join us on the Scotland Tour 2001.