Thursday, May 26
…and awoke to my alarm at 6:45 am because the
first class attendant told us we’d get breakfast in bed around that time and I
wanted to be dressed before the attendant came. I think I must’ve awakened more
than a dozen times during the night and likely slept fairly lightly from all the
sound and motion.
Breakfast didn’t arrive until 7:30, which
meant I could have slept fitfully for another 45 minutes or so. Oh well. Laura
had the Highlander’s Breakfast of egg, ham (which she prefers to think of it as
rather than the typical British “streaky bacon”), haggis, and mushrooms. I had
a bacon buddy (a hamburger roll with a slice of streaky bacon inside—that’s it.
You add your own HP sauce. We also had coffee, tea, and OJ. We rolled up our
window shades, sat up in bed and watched the beautiful Scottish highland go by.
Around 8:30 am we arrived suddenly in
Inverness and we scrambled to get our stuff and ourselves off the train. As we
waited to come into Inverness we both felt like our land sickness had ended and
were trying to recall when it seemed to have stopped. Neither of us could
really recall an exact moment when we felt it had ended, but exiting the train
into the small Inverness station we soon rediscovered that we both still
retained the wobbly dizziness of land sickness. Argh!
We took a taxi to the hotel, up the hill
above the center of town, and dropped off our bags as were far too early to
check in, then walked down the hill to explore the small town.
We had a coffee
at Costa and checked out a few souvenir shops as well as some Scottish clothing
stores, found a custom kilt maker who had a huge selection of tartan swatches,
and found in one swatch book the Hannay tartan. That was pretty neat. No, I did
not order a custom kilt.
We went to the visitor center in town and
ordered tickets to take a tour to Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle, the famous
ruins on the edge of the loch. After walking back up the hill we went back to
our small hotel to see if our room was ready. It was not, so we had lunch in
the pub. During lunch I became increasingly tired, convinced that though I felt
I slept well on the train, it was only a light sleep due to the constant noise
and motion. Unlike me, all I wanted was a nap.
Finally, our room was ready, but it was 1 pm
and we had to leave by 1:45 to get to our bus for our tour. The nap would be
short. We didn’t even bother to unpack. But our room was warm, there was too
much noise from the street, and we both knew we had an alarm to get up and so
neither one of us really slept.
On the bus, we drove from Inverness to the
Loch Ness. The view of both town and the countryside on the way to the lake was
nice. We got to a small dock where others were waiting and a large catamaran
pulled up, we boarded and were off on a short journey across the great Loch
Ness toward Urquhart Castle. A depth finder showed how deep the Loch is as we
went—over 750 feet at the deepest point we saw on the display. The catamaran
came to shore at Urquhart Castle and we all clambered off with a strict
admonition to only spend 55 minutes at the castle, as the driver would be on
her way on time.
We walked the ruins, reading all the didactic
panels, and scaling tight, spiral staircases up to walls and keeps. The spirals
really did Laura’s land sickness a number and she felt dizzy and disoriented
after. We made our way back to the car park and boarded our motor coach back to
Inverness.
The sun finally came out and we found a neat
little pub near the castle (which had been converted to a working courthouse)
we had a pint.
The evening wearing on and each of us exhausted we went back to
our inn and juggled clothing for the following day and too tired to figure
anything else out, went down to the pub/café and had dinner in our hotel. It
ends up I had a fantastic chicken filet wrapped in pancetta and stuffed with
haggis and Laura had a Lamb shank as big as her head. It was a great meal.
The sun finally set around 9:45 pm and we
went back to our room to prep for bed, finally climbing in to sleep around
10:50. It was still light out! Our room was still warm and the noise from the
street (and the beer garden outside our bedroom window) still prevalent, but we
both fell fast to sleep.
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