Inverness, Scotland, United Kingdomaug 28 Mardon Guesthouse 37 Kenneth St Inverness Scotlandd
Marilynn's alarm woke me up from sleep which is unusual since I am usually awake but this was early since we had to eat breakfast at 7:30 am to get to the Rabbie's tour bus at the bus station.
I gathered my stuff for the trip while Marilynn was in the shower and then I showered and then I looked at my phone and it was only 6:15 am so I lay down on my bed until about 7:20 am so I don't know what time the alarm had actually gone off.
We had breakfast. I had asked James the guesthouse owner to make his scrambled egg, salmon and scone dish with toast instead of the scone so I could take it with me if I had to. This seemed to mess up his process but he was very gracious about doing it for me and then it turned out that I had more time than I needed to finished my eggs, salmon and toast so I apologizized for putting him to all that trouble for no reason.
We made it to the the Rabbie's bus and met the driver and a family of four who was also waiting. We got on the bus fairly soon and other people appeared. Then there was a problem with one man's name listed three times and two extra women who thought they had booked the trip through the tourist info center but apparently did not officially do so. There was a back-and-forth with the bus driver and the company and then finally they discovered that the man had been charged three times and therefore they could take the two extra young women. The young women seemed very nice. I thought they wasted entirely too much time trying to settle this when it seemed so obvious to me that we should take the young women aboard.
Our driver was James MacLeod and he liked history but was knowledgeable about trees and shrubs too.
He talked pretty much the whole time and told us tons of things and told us he was going to play Scottish traditional music but ended up not playing music all that much.
I am getting tired now and will just hit the highlights or maybe just jot down events and fill in later. We have 7:30 am breakfast again tomorrow because we leave on the train before 10 I think.
OK, Inverness is the door to the Highlands so we headed into the Highlands soon after leaving Inverness. Oh, no, I meant to take a photo of the driver's map and I forgot. We must have headed north first, we went through the mountains and the Torridon park. Our first stop was meant to be a cafe but it turned out not to be open so we continued on. We seemed to have quite a few toilet stops. We stopped at various lochs maybe. I think the first stop I now remember was Applecross where we had lunch at the Applecross Inn. I had the large prawns or langostines which were pretty good but I had trouble cracking them. Marilynn thought I should use the pliers but I really don't do as well with them as my fingers, because these were really shrimp, but big ones. It had a little salad with it. Then we went south through the west coast road which was single track and windy through higher mountains with little or no trees but had some heather and broom, and looked a lot more like what I expected the Highlands to look like. I have to admit that, as many times as the tour drivers pointed out when we entered the Highlands, or that we were in some part of the Highlands, I still do not know exactly what constitutes the Highlands.
Somehow this blog does not include the thrills of seeing the beautiful landscapes of Scotland. A lot of the scenery is relatively treeless, with the low-lying shrubby plants like heather and broom. But several of the roads through the more mountainous - I am assuming the Highlands part here - were gorgeous. My photos from the moving vehicle do not do it justice. One particular road is quite famous - the Bealach-na-na (Pass of the Cattle) for being single-track (which I guess means two-lane, very windy and dangerous to drive in poor weather conditions. I just tried to soak in the visuals and hear the bagpipes in my head.
It wasn't until really late in the tour that we got to the Eilean Doane Dstle ad James recommended that we just take photos from the bank of the loch since they charged over 3 pounds to go over the bridge and around 10 pounds to go into the castle and you weren't allowed to take photos inside, only where there was sky above you. So not even Marilynn opted for the castle.
He said the half hour we saved would be used to visit another splended place. We had views in the mountains as the mist cleared a bit and then we got to Duncan's land where we walked over a bridge and took a photo of Invermorrison Falls and we also visited a waterfall at at battle site Gle Shiel. Our final stop was a view of Loch Ness. That particular view of it (although not bad) was probably the least attractive view of the whole tour. James was a good tour guide and had plenty of stories and information.
We got back to Inverness about 7 pm and tried to go to MacGregor's to see if they still had music, but they didn't. The waitress recommended some other places and James had mentioned Hootananny's but Hootananny's was not serving food on Sunday but they did have music. We tried a bunch of places to find something for me to eat and ended up in an Italian restaurant where I got calamari and Marilynn got soup because I was hungry but Marilynn was not. By then it was around 8 pm so we ended up giving up on the music. We came back to the guesthouse and packed up for tomorrow and then started working on our tourist chores and watched the British mystery program.
2025-05-22