Day 4: Urquhart Castle and Ness Islands

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First things first, HAPPY CANADA DAAAAAAY!!

(Sidenote from early this morning – our amazing co-roomies (4 other girls) decided that setting an alarm to blast this morning to some One Direction song would be totally ok... it just kept looping and looping and looping. I was *THIS* close to sitting up in bed and freaking out at them but I didn’t move out of spite. Way to have horrible hostel etiquette guys... geez)

Anyway, this morning we bussed up to Urquhart Castle – about 35min south of here. The ride was lovely (as they all seem to be in Scotland) as we drove down along Loch Ness. Didn’t see Nessie, but did see a lot of boats and cute little houses that have amazing views of the Loch.

Urquhart Castle is a strange little castle... it’s basically just the ruins of the former castle because they decided to blow it up because it might get taken... right, that makes sense. They literally loaded the guardhouse with explosives and kaboom.

The site is still quite nice to visit though – it is right on the water, and although the castle is just a shell of its former-self, you can climb up the old tower and different buildings. It’s nice.

We even saw an info sign that had a picture of a beaver on it! We knew it was a sign from Canada for our day 😉

I also had a good laugh at one of the guides telling some French tourists that a trebuchet was like the French word, trebucher... I’m like... no, not really. I cannon-launcher thing is not like tripping, but that’s cool.

After Urquhart we came back to Inverness and puttered around the stores for a bit – do you know how hard it is to find laundry sheets here? The grocery stores don’t really have house stuff like back home, and the pharmacies don’t either... it took us like... 5 stores to find them.

Anyway, after we dropped everything off we went for a nice walk down along the Loch Ness trail, down towards the Ness Islands which is an absolutely gorgeous area to be around. The river really flows high and fast, plus you have all the trees hanging out over the water and just... it looks grand. We also had fun taking different pictures as we came across various things – sitting on logs, jumping off stumps, etc. (Brilliant moment for the day – we thought a log was a weird log and only after we left did we realize it was supposed to be Nessie haha, fail.)

Oh, and of course all this time it’s been raining but what else is new in Scotland? At least it was a light rain – nothing like Conic Hill.

At the end of the Islands we came across a giant playground – Scottish playgrounds are 10000x better than ours, I’m just sayin’. We goofed around there for a bit – playing on the climbing structures, swings and slides lol. They had these random giant hippos too – one was purple, I was so happy haha. We also saw a great big heron – he was just chilling by the pond, looking for some fish.

And that was pretty much that – we headed back in on the other side of the Ness/Islands. Good day to be had alright. I really like Inverness – it’s a small and cozy city and people have been great. Not exactly the most happenin’ town, but still good fun. The rain – as much as we’ve gotten used to it – is starting to irritate my throat I think... well, not the rain but the dampness. I loaded up on Stepsils for the next few days as it’s supposed to continue to rain pretty much the entire time we’re in Edinburgh too.

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