Visiting Stirling

We went to Stirling to see Stirling Castle. It's built on a big volcanic piece of rock high above the city of Stirling. We just looked at the outside because we had to pay to go in the Castle. We didn't want to spend the money and time there as we were going to see another family who live near Stirling. This is the view of the castle. Then we drove to Alva Glen and walked a fair way up and around a hill to see a place called Smuggler's Cave. We saw a dead deer there - I wanted to bring home the jawbone with some teeth on it but Dad said no.
When we got to the cave there was lots of water rushing out between two rocks at the back of the cave and you could just see a waterfall behind that. It was beautiful. We also saw some waterfalls on the way to the cave - there are some photos showing this.

Then we went to stay at the Maher's house - they have 4 children - Joel 13, Luke 10, Zoe 8, Josh nearly 6. Luke turns 11 in January and I played with him most of the time. We played rugby.

At 5pm when it was dark we had fireworks in their back garden. Their dad, Uncle Shaun, set off lots of different fireworks and it was heaps cool because one of them had 100 shots after it zipped into the sky - it went zzzzzzz bang, bang, bang, bang, bang up to 100!!! There were lots of individual fireworks too - some were coloured, some were sparkly, some were like waterfalls. Some landed on the road and in the trees too. We also had sparklers and we had some food to eat too.

Then we had tea and went to bed about 9pm.

The next day was Sunday and we went to their meeting called Stirling Ecclesia. They have sunday school during the memorial meeting - that was different and it was fun. We learnt about Samson. We sat in the memorial meeting until the reading was over and then we went out for the lesson and came back in just before the adults had the bread and wine.

After the meeting we had lunch and then we wore off some energy at the park - kicking the rugby ball and playing on the field.

Then we went back for the public lecture at 2.30pm and then after that we walked up a hill to the Wallace Monument. This man Mr Wallace killed heaps of English soldiers - one man that he killed he skinned him and used the hide to make a strap for his sword. He also chopped off some horses legs as they ran across a bridge - he had a huge two handed sword.

Then we went back to the Maher's house and packed up and drove back to Aberdeen that night - it was a 2.5hr drive. We slept most of the way.