A Very Nessie Christmas

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Our Christmas holiday started on the 21st of December, even though we had already been travelling around for the last 3 weeks. This trip however, was pretty much just going to be sitting around eating and drinking. We left Cardiff Friday night and headed up to Drumnadrochit in Scotland which is on Loch Ness. Our mode of transport was Jason and Kirstyn’s new Volkswagen camper, Clancy. After a very comfortable 15hr drive in Clancy and a short stop at a very crowded Morrisons in Fort William (to stock up for our Christmas feast) we arrived at our destination. Drumnadrochit is a very small, sleepy village and our cottage is nicer than we expected, with a great kitchen and even a bath!

We arrived to some very cold weather with most things iced over including the river that ran past our cottage. We even drove through a bit of snow on the drive up and at that point our chances of a White Christmas were looking pretty good. But the White Christmas gods were against us in 2007 and it pretty much turned tropical for the next 10 days (we now consider 10 degrees tropical). The days up till Christmas were spent sitting around relaxing with a few beers or glasses of wine and the occasional game of scrabble which managed to kill our festive spirits each time it was played. The “NJOY” pad brought by Jason and Kirstyn took up many hours, particularly for Mick. Despite it’s circa 1985 graphics, the boys spent many hours playing the very exciting (very low tech) games.

Even though there was only four of us we still cooked up a huge feast for our Christmas dinner which included all the favourites with some added extras like duchess potatoes which probably won’t be on the menu next year due to Mick’s cooking ability. Luckily the O’Rourke’s did the bulk of the cooking to make the meal something to remember. We even made our own party hats out of left over Christmas paper to really get in the spirit.

We did manage to get out of the house for a few hours over the week. Some of our excursions included a trip to Inverness, a cruise on Loch Ness with some guy trying his best to sound like Sean Connery, and a walk to Divach Falls which are near Drumnadrochit. The week of relaxing was just what we both needed after a busy month just gone and the next two months to come. But now we’re off to Edinburgh Hogmanay for new years, hopefully Clancy will be able to handle the extra weight in our bellies!

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Photos

Icy River
White Christmas here we come.............. maybe not

Flaming Pudding
The absinthe helped with the flames

Divach Falls
this was one of our rare outings

Monster?
This was as good as some of the other sightings