Castle Hopping

We decided to drive to four near-by castles for a little tour. We could only go inside one of the four so we were a bit disappointed, but we could still go to the castle and tour the grounds and gardens so we had a good day out anyway. Not only did our day include a few castles and a nice drive in the country but it also included lunch that was quite a bargain (one we like to tell about). The day started with the first castle, Drum Castle, which we couldn't go in but could walk around the grounds. We had seen the outside of this one before so we were kind of bummed that this time we still couldn't see anything else and left soon after we got there. Next we stopped at Crathes Castle and got to go in and have a tour. The castle itself was cool but what we were most impressed with at Crathes were the large walled gardens and the huge grounds that the castle is on. It is beautiful there. We really enjoyed that one. Next on the castle tour was Craigievar Castle but on our way there we stopped to grab some food for the road. We stopped at a grocery store to get a ready made sanwich, but went back by where their rotisserie chicken is and made a grand discovery . . . They had a whole barbeque chicken for 99 pence (99 cents if you're an American) so we thought we should share that. So we grabbed an individual bottle of diet cherry coke to share (unfortunately we found out the hard way that the British version tastes like cough syrup . . . yuck!) and then realized we would need some napkins since we'd be eating this whole chicken in the car by ripping off the pieces like savages. Well, they didn't have complimentary napkins for us so we went to the paper towel section and found the cheapest paper towels (a four pack for a pound [$1]). We were so excited...a whole chicken, a drink and a four pack of paper towels for 3 pounds! It was quite funny driving down the road eating a whole chicken though. We got a kick out of it anyway! Back to the tour . . . Craigievar Castle looks a lot like Crathes on the outside and we couldn't go in because it was closed for the winter already. We stayed long enough to take a picture and that's about it. Then we were off to our final castle, Castle Fraser, which we thought looked very cool from the outside but unfortunately couldn't go in because there was a wedding going on. But we did tour the grounds and the walled garden which were beautiful. We've attached a picture of each castle, including a picture of part of the gardens at Crathes.