We got up fairly early on Saturday. The place that we were staying included breakfast that was cooked by the owner, so we had fruit, toast, eggs, bacon (english bacon, which is pretty much ham), grilled tomatoes and grilled mushrooms (Greg only) washed down with tea and coffee. The food was really good, but the tea and coffee was sort of blah, so we grabbed some coffee and hot chocolate on the way out from Starbucks. We also stopped in at Marks & Spencer to pick up food for a picnic later in the afternoon.
We started out by driving down the south side of Loch Ness which has some beautiful views. We had heard that this side was a lot less travelled than the north side, and we quickly found out why as the majority of the roads were one lane for both directions of traffic. There were just some "passing places" where a little bit of the road jutted out so that two cars could barely fit on the road at the same time. We definitely never saw roads like that in Atlanta :)
Before we left for Scotland, we had invested in some nice raincoats, given Scotland's reputation and actually London's reputation as well. It turned out to be a great investment as all of the rumors about Scotland's climate turned out to be true for us.... it poured down the majority of the time we were there. We got to try out our raincoats for the first time when we stopped off at Foyers Falls, which was a short hike down some stairs. They were pretty, but seemed rather small compared to what we had seen before. We had read that they were more impressive if there has been a lot of rain before, so apparently there hadn't been all that much.
We then hopped back in the car and headed down to Fort Augustus, a small town on the Loch. We stayed for a little bit, but the next leg of our journey required a little more driving, so we wanted to go ahead and get moving.
Our next trip was to Glenfinnan, which has the Glenfinnan Viaduct. We wanted to see it because it was featured in the Harry Potter movies (there is a scene where the train goes over it.) It was cool to see, but it was still pouring down rain, so it didn't make the pictures look as good.
We then drove back to Urquhart Castle. Urquhart castle is more of a ruins then a castle. The castle was destroyed quite, but you can still walk around the ruins. It is right off of Loch Ness so there were some spectacular views. Fortunately, the rain held out for a little while to give us a chance to explore.
When we first walked outside we saw the most beautiful rainbow that extended all the way across the Loch.
The next stop was the Loch Ness Visitors Center, this is where we took pictures of Nessie, mainly Tami with Nessie.
After that, we headed back into Inverness. We were pretty tired, so by the time we got there, we started looking for a place to eat so that we could get back to the Inn. We ended up going back to Girvan's since it was close by and we were too tired to look for much. After that, we went back and hung out at the Inn before going to bed.
We even got to listen to the UGA football game before going to sleep.
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