A Search for the Loch Ness Monster

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The University of Edinburgh occasionally organizes trips for international students to go on. Our friends decided to go on a trip to Loch Ness and try and find the monster! There happened to be a winter storm blowing in. This will be a theme for the next few weekends, I believe we are on our fourth named weekend winter storm currently (I am still a couple weeks behind on the blog).

So we woke up early and walked to the bus before the sun rose. We knew it was going to be cold, I was wearing 3 layers of pants, but I was surprised at the torrential rain. There were seven of us on this trip, so of course we took over the back of the bus. Immediately, we found out that our itinerary had changed because of the low visibility and crazy rain. That worked out because we got to go to the town of Inverness instead, which is so far away that you normally cannot get there in one day. I took a quick nap early on, but by the time I had woken up we were driving past mountains covered in snow.



Once we arrived for lunch in Inverness we walked up to a castle that is now used as a court. The rain had slowed down for a second, but of course the wind had not stopped. Our umbrellas were flipping inside out and breaking.



Afterwards, we tried to do some more exploring because we had brought sack lunches, but it was Sunday and so many things were closed and we didn’t have a lot of time. Braden did find the Flat Earth Society, which gave us some laughs. If you can prove that the globe has curvature, they will pay you $10,000.

Then we got back on the bus and drove around Loch Ness, the largest Loch by surface area in Scotland. Loch is just a Gealic word for lake. There were crazy high waves because of the winter storm. Honestly, Loch Ness was not crazy impressive, but it was super fun to hang out with our friends. Our amazing tour guide played great music and we sang along. The castle we saw was beautiful and I wish we could have spent more time touring it.





We stopped at Fort Augustus and took a picture with the classic sign.





We sadly did not see Nessie, but we did learn a little bit about the history of the lake. All of the classic pictures were faked but who knows, maybe we will find a monster one day. A scientific experiment found about 24% unidentifiable DNA in the Loch. Maybe there are still mysteries!

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