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Published: November 15th 2008
Scotland
Loch Ness and the castle ruinsHere are some of the things you learn when traveling with eight people to Scotland…. DO not travel with eight people, and DO NOT travel with eight people. If I don’t learn anything during classes I will at least have this simple concept figured out. Yet I do plan on being very studious once classes start… (maybe if I take a class on traveling)!
After Chester we (me, Kiley, Alicia, Drew, Paul, Nalan, and Hass) decide to go to… SCOTLAND! Why not see what those bagpipers are up to, plus we still have a big travel bug itch that can’t be stopped unless we go somewhere, and somewhere soon. (I’ve decided my travel bug will never go away, and I am perfectly OK with that). So here is the itinerary so to make this blog easier to follow:
Sep. 16th take an overnight train to Inverness, Scotland
Sep. 17th wake up and get off our train, find a way to get to Loch Ness and the Brodie castle in 5 hours (exaggeration) then head to Edinburgh, Scotland
Sep. 18th be in Edinburgh and have a brilliant time
Sep. 19th conquer Arthur’s seat
Sep. 20th
Scotland
Kiley, Paulie, Hass, Nalan, Alicia, and me on our boat trip go home and recover.
So the night train… this was not my first night train, but it was the first time I had to sleep sitting up. At first I thought my seat would lean back and spent a good hour trying to make it and then I realized it was already leaned back, such a disappointment. I don’t think I will ever EVER learn how to sleep in any position than horizontally laying down in a bed of some sort. My plan of attack was to take over the first two unoccupied seats together, which I did and slept peacefully for the last 2 hours of the trip. We ended up in Inverness, Scotland. It seemed to be a very little town that we saw nothing of except for the back alley connecting the train station to the bus station - we saw that at least 50 times. But mostly we were running since we have a great way of being amazingly close to late everywhere we go. Most of the time it was our fault, but we did have an encounter with the slowest worker in the entire world. He didn’t enjoy me trying to pay him
Scotland
Loch Ness in euro’s either… I don’t understand…
Our first trip from Inverness was a quick tour of the Loch Ness. I had completely forgotten until I was reminded by my many travel buddies. Plus who goes to Scotland without a quick hunt for ol’ Nessie. It was a very pretty town, and it was very obvious it survived off the Loch Ness tourist (that would be us). We decided to go for the boat tour which was led by a very grandfatherly man. It was nice that he didn’t just entice us about the monster the entire time, instead we got to learn more about the castle on the point and about the Loch itself. We went right after high tourist season so the town itself was quite empty, but everything was still in bloom and very pretty. Overall the loch reminded me of Canada on a very calm day. Except there wasn’t any islands to park for lunch, and Dad wasn’t singing to the fishies.
After making the bus back to Inverness a couple of run-arounds then we finally set out for my most awaited part of the trip…. (cue dramatic music… fade out) THE BRODIE CASTLE!! (bang
Scotland
Loch Ness cymbals and blow the kazoos) You know you’re important when you have a village, and a castle, and a lake, and a car park, and a hiking path to your castle (needless to say that important person would be me, and my family too… I guess). It is quite a hike out to the castle, but I felt completely worth it. The castle has pinky color, and during the spring it is supposed to be very pretty with the daffodils in full bloom. We got a tour, which they would NOT let me go for free (stupid Scottish Trust), AND we could NOT take pictures (stupid Scottish Trust, again!). The inside was brilliant! The Brodie’s have a ton of stuff. Normally when the Scottish trade takes over a castle it adds to it to show what it would have looked like in it’s prime… didn’t have to with ours. In hindsight I wouldn’t have told them I was a Brodie that way I could sneak a couple of pictures, but since they knew my last name they were watching me like a hawk. We had to take the short version of the tour in order to make our bus back.
Which we ended up running for, at least I’m working out while I travel.
The next couple hours are boring because they involve travel and sleeping so I’ll skip ahead to the next day… With the sun shining brightly into our hostel we woke up. Don’t know if I’ve said this before but I good tip when traveling is finding out where your hostel is before you go ahead and book it. What looks like a good deal is normally because it’s out in Timbuktu, such as our case (and we wanted to walk the 20 minute drive… thanks goodness for shuttles). Some of you may know that Joshua Griffin Rivenbark (if this name sounds familiar it’s because we went to France and Italy together) is studying in Edinburgh, Scotland. We made plans to meet up later so when we first arrived in town we had to find something to do. It just so happens that Edinburgh is proud to host FREE walking tours (sounded just about perfect for us poor college kids). I would recommend this tour to anyone, and I have, because it is amazing. It is three hours of walking around, but the amount of information
you learn is incredible. I feel like I’ve lived in Edinburgh now because I know so much history involved with it. Plus it lets you get a pretty good layout of the old city where we spent most of our time. Edinburgh is supposedly the world’s most haunted city so naturally we went on a ghost tour that night. (Those wondering we did meet up with Joshua for dinner, but then he left us.) It was mostly a repeat of the free tour, but not free. There were some good knee-slapper jokes that I found funny. The one good thing about that tour was the free pint afterwards. We talked our tour guide into staying out with us, and our previous tour guide from before met up with us too - so we had no way of getting lost with two tour guides. And any night wouldn’t be complete without seeing some men in kilts which five of them happened to walk into our pub. Very cool, and no I did not ask what they wore underneath… I don’t want to know. As far as trips go I was pretty content with Scotland after a day of the Brodie Castle
Scotland
The Brodie Castle + me and men in kilts.
The next day we awoke and had adventure on the mind. Edinburgh is home to Arthur’s seat, which is a very large hill that King Arthur is supposedly buried under. After our first adventure of finding our way to Arthur’s seat we eventually started the ascent. We quickly realized we’d been fooled and only walked up the small crag’s in front of the actual Arthur’s Seat. So Joshua, Alicia, and I tried again. It was very windy on top, but a very rewarding view. You forget you in the middle of the city when you start climbing, and once you get to the top you expect to see a beautiful scenic landscape, nope just a city. A very cool city with a castle! After conquering Arthur’s Seat Joshua left to go do his fresher week things and we went to go eat/shop around the old city. Our first stop was naturally food. I had my first bit of haggis, pretty yummy. It was at a pub so I think it was a bit blander than it’s supposed to be, but basically it’s meat (I’m not telling you what kind of meat, because then you’ll be
Scotland
the only picture inside the Brodie Castle (the armor room) very grossed out) and mashed potatoes and a very creamy whiskey sauce. Mmm, mmm yum. Then we went onto the Royal Mile and made our way up and down stopping the numerous Scottish stores for gifts, knick knacks, and to see what kind of Brodie items were for sale.
The next day we went home. This was very uneventful for us, but very eventful for the bachelorette party in the car with us. I’m pretty sure I’ll be going back to Scotland again… this time w/o the large group.
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