In honor of finally getting up some photos from Scotland, I am reposting my previous Scotland blog post so you have a better commentary. The photos are here.
We started off our only full day in Inverness by going to Culloden Battlefield. This was the last battle fought on British soil, in 1745. Here Bonnie Prince Charlie lost to the evil British (well, it IS a Scottish memorial) after having nearly been able to march all the way to London. The battlefield has been kept in fairly good condition and they have a nice little museum as well as an example of a house from that time period. I bought some small things from the store, including some great candy. You can’t help but feel sorry for the Scots for losing this battle since afterwards the Brits basically stamped out their culture for 50 years or so…
After that we went to Cawdor Castle, home to the Thane of Cawdor and setting of Shakespeare’s MacBeth. It is fairly certain that Shakespeare had never seen Cawdor when he wrote MacBeth, but he probably wished he could. This was an amazingly beautiful little castle. The gardens were in my opinion the best I have seen outside of Butchart Gardens in Victoria. Got some great pictures here. They also had a hedge maze, which made Christi very excited, but only until she realized that we couldn’t go into it 🙁 . Apparently the hedge isn’t hardy enough to have a bunch of folks traipzing through it all the time. The Cawdors apparently stay in the Castle in winter and open it to the public in summer, which is the opposite of what I would do if the place was mine, but I guess they probably don’t get many tourists in winter in Scotland. We had lunch in the restaurant at the castle. I had some more good beer and even took a picture of the bottle.
Lunch started at just the right time since it started raining right about then. After that, we got in the car and drove south down the Loch to Castle Urquhart. On the way we passed this funky speed limit sign that was digital and apparently had a radar gun in it because it showed your speed and then either a happy face (if you weren’t speeding) or a frowny face (if you were). Frowny face for me and I started laughing so hard I nearly put us in a ditch! Castle Urquhart is the castle one generally sees in those movies and TV shows about Loch Ness. It is a ruined castle on the edge of the Loch, with some great views. We got some amazing pictures here, which unfortunately still aren’t up (sorry). While we were here, I bought dad a “monster dram” of Nessie Scotch. After that we went to the Nessie museum where we were pretty much told that there IS no Loch Ness monster, which made us feel good :). Actually Christi maintains that she saw Nessie on the Loch, so THERE.
After the museum was the obligatory souvenir store and I bought a Scotland shot glass while JC thought seriously about buying a kilt. After all this drove back north along the Loch just long enough to stop and have a drink at a hotel bar overlooking the Loch. Then we went back into Inverness to look for some food. By this time we were getting tired of fish and chips so we went looking for a pizza place. We had to park a ways away and then walk to the pizza place. Apparently pizza is REAL popular in Inverness because we had to wait a while. Took some cool pics of Inverness at 9pm with the sun still out and went home to try to sleep and get ready for Wales.
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