Road to the Isles

The problem with writing up posts almost a year after the events they describe is that you forget where exactly all of your photos were taken. Whoops. But better late than never~!

For this post, I'm going to focus on scenes from the Road to the Isles, an absolute must-see part of Scotland. The Road itself refers to the A830, which connects Mallaig, where the ferry docked and deposited us back on the mainland (can I say that since Britain itself is an island?) and a major port town for continuing on to the Hebrides, to Fort William, a large-ish Highland town. More on Fort William later.

The reason you should really travel this route is because of this:



and also this:



maybe this?



You may not believe me, but I am being really selective with my pictures here. It's just so pretty there and we had such a nice day to drive it. See?



I know, if none of those swayed you, this ought to:



That's our little blue Ford for the trip. It was a good little car. Anyway, as you may have surmised from the open car door, we took the opportunity to get out and hike around a bit, mostly to go check out a baby waterfall we saw about halfway up the hillside. The whole Highlands area is big with hikers for hopefully obvious reasons. I would love to get back and actually do some thorough exploring.

Along the route are several little villages that can be fun to poke around in. Perhaps the best known is Glenfinnan, and that shall take centre stage in the next post, which hopefully will not take six months to write!

Loch Ness & Urquhart Castle

Sadly, this is as close to Nessie as we were able to get. I'm also really proud of this picture because the woman who took it for us got 2 shots: one with Max blinking and the other with Ellen blinking. And you totally can't even tell that I had to edit in Ellen's eyes from the other picture so we all have smiles & open eyes. Of course, now you all know that and will scrutinize the picture, but I'm still proud of myself. So yes, moving on.

Loch Ness!

There it is. A great big lake under misty, rainy, Scottish skies. At this point we are officially near-ish the middle of the Highlands, which I'm going to maintain are absolutely the most gorgeous place on earth until proven otherwise. Just wait until we get further west- Skye and Glencoe are to die for. But then I like mountains.

Apparently the best views of Loch Ness can be seen from the tower at Urquhart Castle (below), which overlooks the loch.

I'm sure it is very nice, but they charge you something like 13 pounds to get onto the grounds (eww) and we were here during the one afternoon that it just poured down rain on us. So we skipped the castle and just snapped shots from the castle parking lot, which is actually not a bad place to see the castle from because it is on a cliff overlooking the castle and the loch. Or at least it wouldn't be if there weren't a pretty solid line of trees blocking your view. But there are breaks in the trees, you just have to find 'em.

At this point I should probably toss out there that Urquhart was once one of Scotland's largest castles, and that most Nessie sightings occur near the castle. There are also a number of boats you can ride in the area to get some great views of the loch and the castle (see? There's one right there!). But save it for a day less miserable than the one we had. Urquhart was transformed into the ruin you see today in 1692, when the Royalists destroyed the castle rather than let it fall into the hands of the Jacobites. But for that story, you'll have to wait for the next post highlighting the battle of Culloden.