In my first post about our trip to Scotland, we came to the end of our stay in Edinburgh. Our plan was to rent a car, which gave us quite some problems, but in the end we did get a car and it meant that our trip was back on track just as we planned it. We rented a Honda Jazz, shown on the picture below, and according to the rent-a-car employee, it wasn’t even 6 months old.
As you’re well aware, driving seat in cars in Britain is on the right-hand side of the car. I was our designated driver and before I got in the seat, I wasn’t really sure what it will be like. After the first few unsure minutes, I quickly got the hang of it and it wasn’t as hard to drive on the opposite side of the road as I thought, comparing that to the roads in Slovenia.
Our first of the two stops on the way to Inverness, where we were staying overnight, was St. Andrews. The drive from Edinburgh wasn’t that bad and it took us about two hours to get there. Some of you might know it as the home of golf, and others might have heard that the University of St. Andrews is the first and the oldest university in Scotland. We spent about 2 hours in town, visiting British Golf Museum, going to the beach and walking around the town itself a little.
We then left St. Andrews behind and headed onwards to our second stop of the day, Dunnottar Castle. The most memorable part of that was the cold. 😀 Sunshine followed us from Edinburgh, but being on the coast of the North Sea means it’s always very windy and cold. We couldn’t take more than few photos at a time, because our fingers would get so cold, so we had to warm them up in our pockets. We spent the majority of our day on the road, so by the time we got to Inverness, we were pretty tired. The owners of the house we stayed the night at have offered to give us a short tour of the city, just to see some major sights, and before going to bed they offered us a tasting of one of their whiskeys. I will get back to our accommodation and all the experience with that later on, maybe in this post or another one, so I wouldn’t want to talk about that a lot right now.
The next morning we got back in the car quite early, so we would get to our first stop of the day, Culloden Battlefield, at 10 o’clock when they open for visitors, because we had another day full of different things we wanted to see ahead of us. From there, we continued on our way along Loch Ness. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see Nessie, not for the lack of trying though. 😀 After leaving Loch Ness behind us, we headed for Uig on Isle of Skye, where we were staying that night. If you have watched the movie Highlander, you will recognize this next castle we stopped by.
For anyone that wouldn’t know, like I didn’t when we were actually there, this is Eilean Donan Castle. As I mentioned a few words back, this is one of the places where they filmed Highlander, back in 1985. Again, we didn’t go inside the castle, due to shortage of time, so we got back on the road towards Isle of Skye’s largest town, Portree. To be honest, there isn’t a lot of things to see in the town, or on the rest of Isle of Skye for that matter. But the views… OH MY GOD! We reached our overnight stay in Uig just a few minutes before sundown, and in my opinion, that was one of the most beautiful views I have ever seen. Well, only until the next day.
You can already see what I’m talking about in my cover photo for this post. That morning we woke up to yet another beautiful day with clear blue skies. We had to get to Oban by the end of the day, so we had two choices leaving Isle of Skye. We could’ve gone back the way we came to Uig, or we could go on and come back down the island on the other side. And thank God we decided for that second option. The route was a little longer that way, but as it turned out, well worth it. We found a resting area let’s call it, alongside the road, and we climbed up a small hill next to it to see the most breathtaking views of the whole trip.
So this would be it for this post, it is a bit longer than I thought it was going to be, so expect another post about our trip since it wasn’t over yet, things started to get veeeery interesting from here on out. 😀
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