All Hail and Farewell to Oban

We have heard a great deal about Oban this past year. The missionaries who have served there have loved the place. We decided some time ago that we wanted to go there sometime, and our opportunity came a couple of weeks ago. The mission closed the house that we rented as a meeting house down there, and as many of the seniors as could manage went down to clear the house and pack the contents into the moving van that we had rented for the weekend. Oban is beautiful. It is a summer resort town on the west side of Scotland, and even in the middle of winter with slush on the ground, it is utterly beautiful.

Furniture packed, work done; let's all go out to lunch at the waterfront. A dreadful photo taken for us by a kind passer-by.

We travelled down on the Friday night and slept over at a pleasant hotel which supplied us with an adequate bedroom and a super-deluxe breakfast consisting pretty much of anything we wanted. Everyone else drove down on the Saturday, so this gave us some time to explore and also got us to the house a couple of hours before everyone else. Richard hauled furniture downstairs and Louise packed and arranged things and did some cleaning. Richard managed to get all the furniture downstairs except for a large, bulky wardrobe. He also managed to open the front door, which apparently could not be opened. Neither of the previous two sets of missionaries assigned to Oban had any suggestions for opening it. They both declared that they had never seen it open and didn't think it could be opened. Time for the hatchet and spade!

Here is Richard using a hatchet and ingenuity to get the door open. He succeeded without destroying the door, though one of us was a trifle worried for a minute or two.

Once the door mechanism had been persuaded to cooperate with a little leverage applied we tried to open the door so we could carry large furniture through. We then discovered it was not possible to open it all the way, courtesy of the floor, The concrete floor sloped and the two doors could only open about 45 degrees before jamming solidly on the floor. However both doors partially open turned out to be enough for the larger furniture. 

A couple of young missionaries arrived after a while, and then the rest of the party. Four great big strong men managed to get the wardrobe around several corners, over the banister rails (like a 3-D tetris puzzle) and downstairs without harming themselves, the house or the wardrobe, and then the silly thing fell to pieces while they were carrying it along the path to the van.

After the work was done we all went out to lunch, and then the others went for some ice cream while we visited McCaig's Tower, a fascinating structure built by a wealthy man with the intent of providing employment for the unemployed during hard times.

Here are some more photos of the tower and of the view from the tower.

Then we drove back to Edinburgh. We drove through several mountain passes on the way home, passing near Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Britain. At 4000 feet it won't hugely impress those living in the Rocky mountains, but it was quite high enough and northern enough to have snow on the mountains and snow on the ground, but not much on the roads, thankfully. 

A busy weekend, another seaside town, some beautiful scenery en-route and good work accomplished for the mission; count this one as a win.