A Benvie family reunion

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Sunday 19th July
A Benvie family reunion
The day has dawned with more misty light rain and it seems like that at least the first part of our driving day will be wet.
We are heading today for Montrose on the east coast north of Dundee to stay with my cousin Aileen and husband John.Aileen has arranged a Benvie family reunion giving us an opportunity to meet more of the clan that we haven’t met before.
We have planned a bit of a circuitous route across the country to get to Montrose as we haven’t yet been to Scotland’s most famous place names,Loch Lomond.
From Ballachulish we took the A82 heading up the Glencoe valley climbing over a spectacular pass.At the top the light rain stopped enabling us to take photos of the grand scenery of steep hills and the road winding its way up to the summit of the pass.The temperature recorded by the car was sitting at 11C and it was probably chillier with the breeze factor taken into account.
With the rain has come waterfalls and that adds to the scenery and adds more interest to photos.
Once we had crossed the summit we had the feeling of the lie of the land being all downhill and in reality this was the way it was as the road ran down to the foothills of the Highlands.
We were pleased we worked our route to take in Loch Lomond as it is quite difference in appearance to those in the higher altitudes with bush coming right down to the waters edge.The only problem that brings for the road traveller is that the bush alongside the roadside hides the loch as you drive along.And there weren’t many notified car parks to stop to take in the changing scenery of the very long loch resulting in us passing hidden stopping places.
Just above the halfway point of the road down the loch there is a good size car park with facilities and at least from here with a slight bend in the loch you do get good different views both up and down the loch and across to a hotel on the other side.
Leaving behind Loch Lomond we took the A811 in a more westerly direction with Stirling in our sights for a lunch stop.Soon the two major attractions of the city came into view,the Wallace monument and the castle and we knew we were close.
We had shopped at Tesco’s in Stirling when we visited the castle just over a week ago and we found the store easily.
Here though another of those oddity’s of the country came before us.We arrived at the store a little before 12.30pm and did our shopping noticing though that the wine and beer aisle was closed off by barriers although there wasn’t a notice for the uniniated such as ourselves to tell us why.Had there been some sort of problem discovered that had taken wine and beer sales off the menu for shoppers???!!
We paid for the things we needed and asked the shop assistant why the aisle was closed off.Then it became clear to us as she said that alcohol could only be sold after 12.30pm on a Sunday and that as it was now 12.31pm the aisle would be open!!!Come on Scotland get into the 21st century!!!!and amend the law.
Having already taken in all the towns and places we wanted to see in the Fife and Angus areas we took the A90 planning to turn off at Brechin for the short run to the coast and Montrose.
We did however make one more stop in at Benvie as Gretchen wanted photos of the locality with the sun,which was out by now,shining.
We hadn’t actually Google mapped Aileen and Johns’ home near Montrose thinking that we should be able to find it easily as it was located next to the Scottish Wildlife Centre on the edge of the Montrose water basin.
The tourist attractions are very well signposted in the UK so we followed the brown signs and found their home at Sa’ty Dyke very easily!!The name of their home you may be wondering about refers to the salty inlet and sand dyke that is the Montrose basin.
There was a crowd of 20 including ourselves for the reunion including Aileen’s 2 sisters Viv and Dawn and brother Niall together with their partners and children.Their mum who was married to my cousin Donald also joined in.My cousin Carolyn-Ann who I had also never met before came along as well.It was all a bit scary to meet relatives with Benvie mannerisms and features after only having my brother and sisters to relate to over all the years.
It was a very enjoyable evening of swapping stories about the family and also looking over the family tree and photos that Carolyn-Ann had and how much more involved the Benvie family tree of direct decendants actually was.Everyone bought food for the table and we dined very well.
The evening ended with a photo session of all those who attended on the steps of the entry to John and Aileen’s home giving us more special memories of this adventure.

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Photos

The Benvie Scottish connection
Me and the cousins

Comments

[Rin]

Pretty cool to see a photo of Benvie with green trees and not covered in snow! :-0 And what an ace photo of *the Benvies* at the reunion

[KJ]

The cuzzies eh?
So pleased you got to meet the Scottish cuzzies and even better to see some photos of them. I appreciate many Benvie mannerisms are probably there and yet we have been separtaed from that line for 2 generations-there's something to be said for genetics isn't there?