Kim & Phillipa’s Blog

Who goes to Scotland in Winter, you might ask? A couple of Aussies who have no passports and a week of holidays to use before December, that’s who! We made our way to Scotland by train for a week of climate conditioning, which ended up making London seem quite toasty

We left the day of the election (and the fantastic result) after rising at 7am to be at an election party in London to watch the results - something I never thought I’d see myself doing, let alone cheering about!!! We made our way to the train station, totally pushing the limit with time as we got on our carriage about 4 minutes before the thing took off. 4 hours later, we were in Edinburgh! And yep, it was COLD!

Found our hostel and it was mighty toasty. So toasty in fact, I woke up sweating in the middle of the night, tried to open a broken window in the dark and crushed my finger in the process. Apart from the fact that Kim woke up in a daze stressed out thinking I’d actually jumped out of the window (for heaven knows what reason), I’d given myself a nasty scab that bled for a long time

We spent a day in Edinburgh, starting with Edinburgh Castle and then to a few of the lonely planet ‘highlights’ that we had a chuckle about. We headed West toward Fort William, stopping at Stirling Castle and a monument dedicated to Robert the Bruce and the battle of Bannockburn. Amazing historical sites and stories. We ended up driving in the dark to get to Fort William so spent the next day driving back around Glencoe and Fort William. We went for a few walks, including one quite spectacular walk up along Nevis Gorge to a beautiful 100m high bridal-veil waterfall. The weather was not fine enough for a walk up the tallest mountain in the UK, Ben Nevis - but we’ll try do that next Summer!

We ended up staying in Mallaig for the night to wait for a ferry to the Isle of Skye the following day. And was it beautiful! The snow capped mountains were beautiful and although we were getting sick of castles, we saw one with a very cool garden! Another walk along a very steep hill/cliff edge and the temperatures were getting colder still! We left our accommodation-hunting too late that day and found ourselves calling any place we could for a room for the night!

We ended up calling a place called ‘Applecross’ that didn’t seem too far away on the map. But as we were driving, in the rain and darkness enveloping our Astra, the terrain was getting harsher and harsher. We realised we were going up through a mountain… and it was a single lane road… and we couldn’t see where the side of the road ended. It was terrifying to say the least - except when the deers with antlers crossed the road lazily in front of us, that was kind of cool

We finally reached our destination alive and were we glad as ever! We don’t know if we were just glad to be alive, but the room we stayed in was the best we’ve ever been in, the bed the most comfiest and the food the most tastiest! And not to mention the traveling Scots having a drink in the pub being very friendly! Applecross Inn is THE place to stay in Scotland! Just take care getting there

The next day, we weaved our way around the mountain ranges with snow capped mountains to Inverness. We found a spectacular gorge that was stunning, but soooo far down!

Next day was Saint Andrews day which meant all Tourist places were free We ended up making the most of it as we visited Fort George, a millitary Fort, the battle grounds of Culloden and then went to the Visitor Centre in Drumnadrochit which is next to Loch Ness. We then made our way back stopping at Glenmore for the beautiful views of the surrounding mountains.

Next we headed to Perth and Saint Andrews to check out the golf course. We thought the mountain ranges were cold - try Scotland near the coast! THAT was cold! We headed back to Edinburgh to stay at an excellent guesthouse and checked out a few more sights in Edinburgh before catching a train back to London

Phew - that was a long story, and a cut down one at that! Well, it was a week’s worth of travelling! What a beautiful country Scotland is, and one we definitely want to visit again!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 2nd, 2007 at 10:20 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.