Plan? What plan?

Alright. 600 pages read and 4,000 words written. Now I have a moment to write quick blog before I need to read my other book for tomorrows seminar.

The road trip went really well. Only once did the driver drive on the "wrong" side of the road. It is only in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand that they drive on the left side of the road. The rest of the world does it right. It rained the first day, but we were driving most of it, so it was okay. We made it to Ullapool and had some whiskey and seafood. It was a fun night.

We drove up the west coast the next day. We stopped whenever something seemed interesting. There were a lot of, I don't know if I would even call them towns, establishments maybe? Anyway, there were many clusters of houses and along the road there always seemed to be one, and I must emphasis one, red telephone. Occasionly, there would be a house by itself and it would have a red telephone booth on the other side of the road, and once, we saw a bus stop with a red telephone booth. It became the running joke in the car that it was the main phone line for the town. Then it came up that it would suck if your house was burning and you had to run all the way across town because there was only one telephone. While we were driving I think it was around Tongue or a little bit after, there was a house that had the fire place going. I said, "They must be sending a mass invite to the town letting everyone know the party is at their place tonight." Marc replied, "And what to bring for food. It was a long stream of smoke." Don't judge. It was a long drive.

We left for our trip Saturday morning and by Sunday evening we were on the ferry to the Isle of Orkney. It was extremely windy that day. I would say it was a sustained wind of 40mph with gusts up to 60. (Look at me, my weather class is paying off). We were surprised that we were able to drive around the island in 45 minutes. However, we took a little longer than that seeing as we made a few stops. We headed back to the mainland that night, and we were happy to escape the wind.

That night back on the mainland, we met Craig. (Obviously we found a place to sleep and ate some food, but why bore you with the mundane?) He invited us to join him for a drink, so we did. We had been wondering what people do around this area in terms of careers, so Anna asked. His response? "Being alcoholics." This was also the night that the Clone walked into the bar. I'll let you imagine the rest. I promise nothing bad happened.

We continued on our journey and as we went further east and south the weather became much nicer. The wind died down and the sun came out. We saw some more sites. We made it to the "end of Scotland," the northern most point of Scotland. There was no light.

We continued heading south. We passed Inverness and continued on to Elgin. However, in Elgin all the hostels and cheap places to stay were full. Luckily, one of the places gave us a few numbers for places in surrounding towns. This is how we ended up in Lossiemouth, and this I'll venture to say, was the highlight of the trip. We walked in and saw this.

And the view out the front was was this.

We decided to stay for two nights.

Before we found this wonderful, though, we experienced our first sunset of the trip on top of a hill overlooking the sea and this small fishermen's town. It was gorgeous!!

While on our way to this heavenly sight, we saw a triple rainbow. But more importantly, we saw the beginning and end of the rainbow. I can now saw that I know what is at the end of the rainbow, and it's not a pot of gold. But an oil rig. Black gold.

Beginning

End

I almost forgot. Between the Northern most point of Scotland and the triple rainbow, we were in the heart of whiskey land. We went to two distilleries. Macallan and Glenfiddich. Scotland makes good whiskey. And these distilleries were located in a beautiful landscape. I'll have to refer to Facebook for photos though, this post is getting long. And for anything else that I mentioned, but didn't post photos for on here (which is a lot of things). I tried to do a better job at explaining the photos on Facebook.

We arrived home Thursday night at 10:30. We stopped in Aberdeen for long enough to have a coffee and tea break and lunch, then we headed out because one of the boys wanted to take a picture of this castle which is a ruin but the most complete ruin (if that makes any sense whatsoever). This is was the amazing picture we were able to get of it.

An amazing dinner of lamb and an hour and a half drive later, we were back in Stirling.

All in all, it was a great trip despite the weather and all the driving. I'm sure there are some things that I forgot to mention, but if you go on my Facebook, you can see the journey through pictures; they're worth more than my words, or so I'm told. But it's time for me to read my book for class tomorrow. Until next time :)