Robot Claw

Yesterday was our rest day and we just boulevarded around Inverness for a while.

That’s a real sporran (as opposed to the cheap ones made for tourists) on sale for £125. It’s expensive for a change purse, but I’ve learned that quality highland dress is not a poor mans outfit (kilts can easily be £600+).

A famous used bookstore in Inverness. Yes this is natural lighting, and yes it’s as pretty as the photo suggests. Sadly it didn’t have the sorts of books I’d have liked to find…

And there’s a highland cow cupcake I bought KLS. Highland cows are very well represented on postcards and yet I’ve sent none featuring them so far. Should I?

We’re up early today to beat the crowds to a local attraction. Let’s hope we succeed!

We drove to Inverness yesterday – our base for the midpoint of our trip – and the drive took us directly past the famous Loch Ness.

We stopped at the almost-as-famous Urquhart Castle for a look see:

This is a wonderful place to visit! I prefer the ruined castles to the rebuilt ones, and they’ve done a great job here showcasing it and explaining the rich history. Plus the views are spectacular with the lake alongside at all times. If you go, don’t even consider skipping the historical film…

Loch Ness itself is dark, deep and choppy with the cool winds always blowing across it. We wandered down to the shore to touch the water and get a closer look at Nessie (the famous lake monster) but she remained elusive.

This is not to say she’s a historical curiosity. Nessie sighting were the highest ever in 2017 and the local tourist industry is absolutely based on her (maybe these two facts are related) with just about every business – from hotels to nursery’s to pet washers – including her name or image on their signs.

And the souvenirs…

Let’s say they don’t hold back 🙂

Nessie herself may have remained hidden, but the mystery of the Loch was real, and I was so happy to have visited a place I’ve fantasized about since childhood. I was so motivated that in an act of astonishing creativity and talent I’ve commemorated the trip in a series of original watercolour paintings on postcards:

Which one will you get?

Skye is an island in the NW of Scotland, and yesterday we did a full day small coach tour to see the many sights on the island. Today’s post won’t include everything we saw, but I’ll say in advance this is an extremely beautiful and scenic location and if you ever visit Scotland you absolutely need to include Skye in your itinerary.

That’s a view from a ridge that runs across the middle of the island. This shot hardly dies it justice (I’ll post panoramas when I return) but the views of the treeless and ancient landscape were astonishing!

This is taken at a place called the Fairy Glen, since the story goes that Fairy’s once inhabited these strange conical hills.

You can see me in the top left of the above shot astride the hill from which legendary piper Alastair McCrimmon stepped into the Faerie Realm. Alas, the gates remained closed for me…

The entire place – nestled in the foothills of the tall mountains on Skye – was quite magical and I would have liked to have spent more time there.

There’s me writing a postcard at the tiny shop in the 5-house town we had lunch before heading to the SW corner of Skye to visit Niest Point:

We walked that trail all the way to the lighthouse behind and it was excruciating mostly due to a staircase not visible here. But the views!!!

Afterwards and at the end of your trip we visited a series of small waterfalls called the Fairy Pools. This required another long walk from the car park:

But it was worth it! We’re I younger and braver I may have even joined those swimming in the cold water!

As I said Skye was amazing and this is just a taste of what we saw. The day was long and we were exhausted at the end, but we’ll remember Skye for a long, long time.

Yesterday did an 11 hour day tour involving 2 coach trips, 5 boat trips and a lot of walking. But it was amazing!

That’s a puffin, and I was only about a foot away when I took this. We had travelled to Staffa island which is a tiny rock west of the large Hebridean island of Mull. Staffa is home to many sea birds, but mostly people come to see the Puffins. It’s right in the middle of chick season now, and there were loads of them!

It was surprising how fearless they were. Be mindful that there were dozens of tourists on the island, and we were able to get extremely close without them flying away or even reacting much at all. They nest in burrows at the edge of cliffs so this naturally limited how close we wanted to get, but I think I had expected them to fly away almost when we were within sight!

Staffa itself is a remarkable place…

It’s one end of The Giant’s Causeway which stretches to Ireland and is mostly made from these usual rock pillars.

There’s a large cave that starts at sea level and continues under the island, and the above photo shows the walkway to view it. Legend has it that the cave was the ancestral home of one of the giants that created the causeway, and while it was once available for tourists to enter these days we can only go up to the entrance.

So rewinding a bit, the above shows two of the boats we rode. Thankfully I didn’t get sick (hooray!) but earlier in the day we were a little worried we had underdressed. Thankfully it got warmer so my shorts weren’t a problem 🙂

The trip took us from Oban to Mull, then all the way across via coach to the southwest post where we then visited Staffa and then were dropped off on the ‘sacred’ isle of Iona, which was home for over a thousand years to a famous abbey.

Iona is remote and windy and sparsely populated. This cat was just hanging out in the ruins of a nunnery from 1200, and was far less interested in us than we him.

Iona had its own tiny – tiny! – post office from which I mailed a couple of cards. Will they have a special cancellation?

Of course we visited the abbey as well, and it was well worth the visit. We had wanted to explore the island a bit more but time was limited and we’d spent a bit of it on a nice lunch.

That shows dinner as well (on the right) which was back in Oban after our 11 hour trip. We saw and traveled a lot yesterday, but to be honest the puffins were so cute and remarkable they almost eclipsed everything else. I also took loads of photos and it was unusually difficult to select only a few for this summary.

Basically it was a great day, and bound to be a highlight of this trip 🙂