We have now seen a small slice of Scotland…
We started in Edinburgh for a few days, walking around the stone-buildinged splendour of the Edinburgh Castle area. You can still hear the horses of long ago on the cobblestone roads if you try. We checked out the ‘Real Mary King’s Cross’ tour, which takes you underground into a place where the bottoms of some buildings were not fully knocked out when room was cleared for a larger building. While this did not create an underground community, it did still allow for a snapshot of what life was like back in the time.
Bussing up to Inverness, I lost half of my main backpack buckle. Fortunately there are an abundance of camping supply stores here. The countryside has some resemblance to the foothill and mountain regions back home (without the tall mountains). It just feels like things are rearranged a little. The bus makes for an excellent way to see this countryside, this holds true for all the countries we have been through so far.
Inverness is a town of about 40,000 and has a decent size centre to look about. It is also the home base for Loch Ness Monster tours. Our package bundled a few things together, and to our fortune, we were the only two in the specific tour slot, meaning that we had some exclusive time with the van driver and was good. We saw the Urquhart (I forget the spelling) Castle, which was blown up by its owners to prevent future pillaging and attacks on it. We saw the Loch Ness 2000 exhibition, which leads you through rooms that tell you about findings and research on the existance or not of the monster. Each room trails off in an "the end?" fashion, which is amusing. And then after all this there was a boat ride down the Loch Ness itself. And on the lake, we saw………….. wonderful scenery! To our great fortune, we hit weather that was unusually brilliant. Apparently it is always cold, grey, and foggy such that you cannot see across the lake, adding to the mystery. But we instead had cold, blue skys, and calm water, showing us what the area truly looked like. Did I see the monster? I’m not going to divulge.
We then bussed into Glasgow.