I was there from last Thursday (the 13th) until Sunday (the 16th). Nowhere near long enough.
To live in Scotland is my new dream.
We took the train to Edinburgh, but only had a few hours there the first night. It was just enough time to go to dinner at an Indian/Thai restaurant and have some drinks at the hostel bar. It was a really nice hostel. We left Edinburgh at 8:30 Friday morning and didn't get to go to the castle or anything. :(
That was the saddest part of the trip.
We traveled around Scotland with a tour bus company called Haggis Adventures. I believe our tour was called "Wild and Sexy Scotland" and our tour bus had WILD AND SEXY written across the side.
Our tour guide's name was Kay (she told us to call her Special Kay), and she was AMAZING. She was hilarious and knowledgeable and had a fantastic accent. She spent the whole trip trying to instill in us the "Deep Scottish Love", or DSL. I had already started feeling it on the train ride to Edinburgh, but it got ridiculous by the time we left. I love that place.
Our first day was a lot of driving through the Scottish countryside. We made a stop at a wee little town called Dunkeld for a bit which had a pretty cathedral and stuff.
Our first real stop was at the Culloden Battlefield. It has a very sad history, which is explained here.
The rest of the day was a lot more driving and taking pictures until we arrived at Loch Ness.
We stayed at a hostel there called Morag's Lodge. The guy running the hostel was young and very attractive and Scottish. So it was pretty great. They fed us a great dinner and there was a crazy hat party in the hostel's bar that night, which was great fun. I didn't have a hat, but somehow I ended up with the attractive Scotsman's helmet.
Kay made the mistake of telling us that one of the rooms in the hostel was haunted but wouldn't tell us which one. I knew it wasn't my room, but that didn't stop me from waking up in the middle of the night convinced that there was a ghost in my room.
We left bright and early the next morning to go on a short walk through one of the most magical places I've ever been: Invermoriston. This was where J.M. Barrie came every summer as a child and based Neverland on. I can't even describe how amazing it was, and the pictures don't do it justice. It was just incredible.
After some more driving, our next stop was the Eilean Donan castle. It was very neat, but it was only (re)built in 1912, so it wasn't very old and spectacular. It has been in a fair amount of movies, though. According to wikipedia, "It has appeared in such films as The Master of Ballantrae (1953), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), Highlander (1986), Mio in the Land of Faraway (1987), Loch Ness (1996), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Entrapment (1999), The World Is Not Enough(1999), Kandukondain Kandukondain (2000), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Made of Honor (2007) and in the television series The New Avengers (1976) and Oliver's Travels (1995)." So that's pretty neat.
Our next stop was some random magnificent cliff where we took lots of pictures. It was awesome, but there was lots of sheep poop everywhere. It made it really slippery. And nasty.
Let's see...what was next...
Oh yeah. We stopped at another cliff on the Isle of Skye known as Kilt Rock. There's a story involving giants attached to it, but I don't recall all of the details. It's just a really cool rock formation. Plus there's a waterfall.
Kilt Rock is the foggy cliff in the background. It's kinda stripy and cool.
The stop after that was one of my favorites. The actual site itself wasn't anything truly special, but what we did there was awesome. Special Kay led us down to a little river and told us a story. Here's what I can remember of the story. Most likely some of it's wrong. So there's these two families that are fighting or something and these elvish folk don't want them to be fighting so they make one clan have the wife get pregnant with the hottest boy baby in the land and the other family's woman pregnant with the hottest girl baby. The idea is to make these two get married, which they are going to do, but on the day of the wedding, something happened and the girl got her face all smashed up and ugly-fied. She was like "Ach, nooo!!! Wha' am I gooing to dooo??" and she decides to just wear her veil down but her fiance made her take it off before the wedding to show his friends how hot she was and he was disgusted and whatnot. So the elvish folk decided to help out and enchant this particular river so that whoever puts their face in the water and keeps it in for five seconds will have eternal beauty. So she did and she was all pretty and stuff. I think she actually ended up marrying the younger brother of the hot guy because the hot guy was mean and the younger brother stuck his face in the river, so he was gorgeous now too. Yay happy ending.
So that's the story. I'm such a good storyteller.
This is a picture of Special Kay telling the story. She's in the hat with the pompom.
And of course me becoming beautified. It was insanely refreshing. Cold, but refreshing. The water is so clear that it is drinkable. Some of my friends filled up their water bottles with it. It was the best water I've ever tasted.
One of our last stops was my favorite. It was called Glen Coe and it was the most beautiful place on earth. It has a bloody history, though. There was a massacre there in 1692. You can read about it here.
With a stop at Trossachs Woollen Mill to visit Hamish the Highland cow and then a final stop at the William Wallace memorial, we were on our way back to Edinburgh to catch the train to London.
The end. :'(
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