London - Scotland!

11/05/2009

We woke up bright and early for our flight to Edinburgh! Our flight is at 8h00 so we’ll have more than enough time for the first day of our Scotland road trip. After a 2 hour flight we collected the rental car from Hertz at 10h00. The weather is once again warm and sunny, with no wind.

We started our trip up to Loch Ness and are surprised with how beautiful the countryside is. We drove past a few small towns and there’s no rubbish in the streets and everything looks like a postcard! Our first stop Doune Castle. Doune Castle may look strangely familiar, even to those who have never visited before. It depends on your taste in films: Doune Castle is a place of pilgrimage for Monty Python fans from all over the world who come to see the place where they filmed parts of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".

We travelled for some time and got a bit restless, we saw a small board indicating a waterfall a few miles down a side road, and we decided to take a look. After a while Leon decided

On the road

Must be either the A84 or A82.

to turn back because it seemed that we would have to travel quite a distance, but before he made a u-turn we came upon a jewel not undiscovered by most tourists (as yet), a town called Killin. We relaxed and stretched our legs in the picturesque little town before setting off to stop number 3. But as it happens in Scotland, before we reached Fort William we enjoyed some wonderful views of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in the British Isles, the mountain tops is still covered in snow and since it’s slowly melting the mountain is covered with little springs an waterfalls!

In Fort William we stopped for some food supplies for the next few days at our self catering place of refuge, we were a bit worried about the place because it was much cheaper than the rest of the lodgings we booked, but Loch Ness Hostel turned out to be quite charming! We had a breathtaking view over Loch Ness from our room window, and the social lounge and dining area had two fireplaces and an old piano! The rustic cozy youth hostel was the perfect place to enjoy our stay in Scotland.

We walked

Doune Castle

"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

out the back and down a few stairs and were on the shore of the famous Loch Ness! We had some brandy with Cherry Coke and it was time for some Nessie spotting. We were a bit out of luck and dead tired, so decided to continue the search the next day. At 22h00 it was still light outside and we planned the rest of our trip and went to bed in our soft clean and comfortable room.

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