Here Nessie! Nessie!

Rob and Jody decided to spend a day by themselves saying that they would be going on a hike around the countryside. This left the two sets of parents and I free to take a drive up to the town of Inverness and around to Loch Ness. It was a beautiful but long drive of several hundred miles. The way up was mostly highway with lots of sheep and craggy rocky hills with some snow capped mountains in the distance.

Things got a little scary as we started to climb and wind around in the mountains where the road narrows down to a two lane road and blind curves. The Scots apparently do all their road repairs and construction around this time of year. We had to stop a dozen times as the road narrowed down to one lane. They have these little portable stop lights they wheel out so you know when the oncoming traffic has cleared and you know when it’s probably safe to proceed.

We spent just enough time in Inverness to stretch our legs and snap a couple of quick photographs. Inverness is a pretty busy little port town that sits between the Moray Firth (a “firth” is a wide sea inlet) and the River Ness.

Further down the river it becomes a loch….basically a lake. Loch Ness is of course famous for purported sightings of a prehistoric deep lake dwelling marine animal, the Loch Ness Monster. The ruins of Castle Urquhart also jut out into the loch and are basically the quintessential picture postcard Scottish castle. The road down from Inverness to Castle Urquhart was narrow and full of curves, pretty scary when you are used to driving on the other side of the road. To make matters worse the speed limit is around 60mph. Stick the speed limit and you are soon to have a train of crazy Scottish semi’s and clown cars behind you driven by the locals who have no qualms about driving a foot from your bumper. We pulled over for a bit at a little Loch Ness rest area to snap a couple of photos and see if we could catch sight of Nessie cruising down the loch. I didn’t have any luck, but it was a real beautiful spot.

After raiding the gift shop in the quaint little Loch Ness Monster tourist trap town of Drumnadrochit we raced to Castle Urquhart to discover that they closed at 4:15pm. The Castle sits down closer to the water and the entrance to the grounds looked to be a subterranean passageway accessible only by paid admission. Bummer we couldn’t get down there and look around, but we were still able to take a few nice pictures in the freezing cold Scottish wind.

I, being the guy always looking for interesting shots, trekked up the road a bit and found a Scottish postcard perfect shot of green hills, sheep and a little cove complete with moored sailboat. All that was missing was some castle ruins, a piper and a whiskey distillery….I’ll Photoshop those in later.

My father hates to go back the same way we’ve come so the return trip we sped down a golf cart wide sized road in the dark which is on the opposite side of the Loch that we came up. As the sun was setting, I spied an incredible shot along the road and pulled over quickly most likely scraping off the majority of the undercarriage of the rented clown car in the process. I think it was well worth it.

After several hours of single lane golf cart sized roads with hairpin curves in pitch black darkness with a trail of crazed lunatic Scotsmen behind us, we reached Glasgow. We just got accustomed to the nice wide multi-lane motorway when suddenly it is barricaded closed for construction and it diverts us straight into the city center. After a dozen roundabouts we decided to stop to feed our growling stomachs. Hey, what can be more Scottish than McDonalds?

Leaving the Golden Arches behind us we zipped on down a major motorway and soon crawled into the beds at the B&B.