This morning we woke up bright eyed and bushy tailed, ready for our tour of the Highlands and Loch Ness. Our day started off fairly ordinary. We had to grab some breakfast prior to getting on the tour bus, and found the only convenient thing was Subway and their breakfast sandwiches again. Everything else was either closed or not fast enough for our purposes.
Our tour was from a company called Timberbush Tours, and our driver/tour guide was a Scottish man named David. It amazes me enough that the people over here can drive in their conjested city centers, but to drive a bus and give an entertaining tour at the same time blows my mind. These people are professionals.
The bus immedieletly headed north out of Edinburgh. Most of the northern portion of the tour was going to follow the Caledonian Canal. Scotland has a major (and I'm thinking relatively inactive) strike-slip fault running east to west, with the section of Scotland that is north of this fault being referred to as the North Glen. This fault left a series of long and narrow lochs, or lakes, that run along the fault. In an industrial revolution type moment (I think it was THE industrial revolution) Scotland connected the lochs with canals and created the Caledonian canal, which runs across the country. At the start of the canal by the North Sea, they have built these futuristic horse heads.
The bus took a few rest stops along the way, mostly at places designed to sell us fine woolen products. This was taken at the first of those places.
After the rest stop, the bus continued to climb higher and higher towards Glen Coe. Glen Coe has been used as a movie set for quite a few recent movies, including Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, where it served as Bond's childhood home. During most of this time, the weather was pretty cold and sleet was falling from the sky.
The bus moved on towards Loch Ness. We stopped for lunch near Ben Nevis, the highest point in Brittain. For such a low mountain (I could look it up, but I'm pretty sure it is < 5000 ft) it is completely obscured by bad weather for much of the year. Because of the weather, it has fatality numbers worse than Mt Whitney.
Along the way, we passed more lochs and some of the locks on the Caledonian canal.
At last, we made it to Loch Ness. The lake is very long and thin. They say it was created by the fault crossing Scotland, but glacial action years ago converted it from a salt water loch to a fresh water loch by creating a massive wall of rock on the end that used to open up to ocean. The loch was beautiful. The water looks almost black up close because of the high peat content of the soil. We did not see Nessie, though they did try to sell us a whole lot of stuff with Nessie on it.
We took a boat tour of the loch. The highlight was pulling up to the ruin Castle Urquardt, which is right on the water. We had the option of getting off and climbing around on it for a fee, but we decided to stay on the boat. Also, our tour guide made it clear that he would leave us in Northern Scotland if we did not get back to the boat in time, and it seemed like he meant it.
The tour finished its northern swing with a quick driving tour of Inverness. Then we turned around and booked it south, crossing the Cairngorm mountains along the way. There was lots sleet and snow, which made the pictures not turn out great.
My real take home from this tour is that we were on the bus all day long and had to take a lot of pictures out of the bus window. As such, I do not recommend this tour. I would have rather gone a shorter distance and done more activity. In one day we went from Edinburgh to the Atlantic Coast to Aberdeen on the north end and back. This is just too far.
We got back to Edinburgh by 810 pm. We went into the first restaurant we saw, which turned out to be an American restaurant called Fuel Stop. It actually took us a minute to realize that it was American food, but by then it was too late. I guess we should be proud that we have a cuisine, though our cuisine could be described generally as overeating.
We headed back to the hotel and got to sleep after a Skyping session with the kids. We will need to be up early tomorrow to catch our flight to Ireland!
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