Sunday, March 4:
Oh my! We slept til noon! How wonderful. I knew we were tired, but I didn’t know we were that tired enough to sleep 12 full hours non-stop! Once we were showered and dressed we headed over to Stirling to tour the castle there. It was raining and cold, but we mustered through. The castle is so old that there really aren’t any exhibits, just empty stone rooms. The bonus was that we were allowed to go ANYwhere on the grounds – and I mean anywhere. There were no restrictions or barricades (in the U.S. we would not have been allowed to climb some random stairs that rose up to the mountain and ended at a wall – the stairs were steep, high above the ground, and led nowhere – the U.S. would have blocked off those stairs in a heartbeat because they were lawsuit city if anyone slipped over the edge). After the castle we explored Stirling a bit, but as it was near closing time by that point, nothing was really open. So we popped into a restaurant and had a meal. Denis started out strong by getting a chicken dish with haggis – and it was actually quite tasty (he let me have a bite).
Monday, March 5:
On this day we woke up early and were out by 8:30 a.m. The main reason was the three hour north drive to Inverness. The drive was quite nice and scenic, but once there we found there wasn’t much inside the city to do. There were tourist attractions nearby (a castle, a battlefield) but I had no real interest in them. We popped into a diner for lunch (I had a venizon burger which tasted like sausage, not venizon). After only another hour we left and drove the west side of the Loch Ness, which is the largest loch in Scotland and the home of “Nessie”, the Loch Ness Monster. We really took our time driving the loch, stopping periodically along the way, taking pictures and buying trinkets. We stopped in Fort William for more walking but everything was just closing and it was raining, so we only stayed long enough to have some dinner (Denis’ fish & chips looked AWESOME but my roast beef & yorkshire pudding dinner was disappointing). We left the restaurant just as a torrential rainstorm started – it was awful. It was raging the rest of the drive back to the timeshare and felt quite dangerous since Scottish roads don’t have lights and are very twisty and narrow. Also? Scottish drivers are nuts. Way worse than any NoNJ, SC/NC driver I’ve experienced. The whole drive back I had to pull over to let crazy Scotsmen pass me by since I refused to go 50 mph on a twisty dark country road in a drenching downpour.
