Cruise Do-It-Yourself: Day 7&8: Glasgow (Greenock), Scotland; At Sea

The stop in Greenock was from 7am to 2am the following morning. This schedule allows passengers to visit the Military Tattoo in Edinburgh which starts at 9pm. The drive from Greenock to Edinburgh is about an hour and a half so doing this excursion would have made it a really long day. Instead, we opted for this tour: http://discoverscotlandtours.com/tours/highland-lochs-glens-castles-shore-excursion/ for £45/person. Doing this tour on our own would have been very difficult as there are limited public transportation to these places.

The tour uses a small mini-bus with a capacity of 16 persons and it was full. We left port at 8am and our first stop was the town of Luss by the shore of Loch Lomond. From there, we headed to the town of Inveraray and a visit to Inveraray Castle. Being a huge Downton Abbey fan, my wife was excited about this stop since one of the episodes on the show was filmed here. The entrance fee to the castle is not included in the tour and costs £10/adult, £6/child. You can learn more about the castle here: http://www.inveraray-castle.com/

We briefly stopped in the town of Inveraray before heading to Kilchurn Castle. From there, we stopped at the Drover's Inn for lunch before heading back to the ship. We arrived back in Greenock around 4:30pm and had a relaxing evening at the ship. The following day was at sea so we got to sleep in the following morning.

The tour was a good value for £45/person since a similar tour from the ship costs $199.95. We got to see the Scottish countryside and the visit to Inveraray castle was the highlight of the tour.

During the next day, my wife and I decided to join a classic rock name-that-tune contest. I listened to quite a bit of rock music when I was younger but my wife knows nothing about classic rock. Luckily we partnered with this guy who probably listens to rock music all day. There were 25 questions and you had to name the song and artist. Our partner knew every single one of them. We scored 47 out of 50 and the mistakes were because of missed or not quite exact words on the song (the person who corrected our answers was very picky). Needless to say, we won the contest and got some kitchen bag clips for our efforts. I think it's the first ever trivia contest we won during all our cruises.