Tuesday, July 16, 2013 @ 9:15 PM in 2013 Europe
Day 20
In order to tour the Highlands, Eric and I thought that renting a car for a few days would be the best way to see everything we wanted to. We found the Europcar rental station and picked up our car at the Edinburgh train station. It was rather exciting trying to get out of the city. After several stalls and issues getting into first gear, we made it onto the motorway and on our way into the highlands.
One of Eric's coworkers has a pen pal in a town called Sterling and he gave Eric something to drop off at his pen pal's house. We made our way there and Eric dropped the gift off and then we headed north to Inverness. The scenery was great along the drive. A lot of it reminded me of the pacific northwest mixed with a little bit of Colorado. We hit a little bit of rain here and there but it ended up passing pretty quickly.
We decided to head over to Loch Ness to get some photos before heading into Inverness to walk around. The drive to some viewpoints along the Loch was nice. We stopped at a gift shop so Eric could pick up something for his nephew and then went to the Urquart Castle. Unfortunately they wanted 7.80 pounds to enter the castle so we took a few photos and opted not to go in.
We navigated back to Inverness and found a parking garage and then walked around the town a bit. We saw the Inverness Castle and walked along the River Ness. Both of us were getting hungry so we found a sandwich shop to get some food at. We were thinking about getting a drink in Inverness but decided to head to Nairn where we had a hotel for the night.
Nairn is a tiny town on the North Sea. We got in around 4:30 and the place already seemed a little bit dead. The hotel is definitely a mom and pop run place. The rooms are laid out strangely and there's a really random mismatch of furniture. Fortunately, there are some really nice views from the window.
We walked down to the harbor and took some photos. I got to put my hand in the North Sea. It wasn't quite as cold as I was expecting but there were only two kids in the water and they both had wet suits on. On the way back from the hotel we grabbed some stuff at a local grocery store and then came back to the room.
Tomorrow we're going to go on a distillery tour and then head down near Dundee Scotland for the night.
Teaser photos:
Tags: daily journal, scotland, edinburgh, loch ness, inverness, nairn
Posted from: Scotland