To Inverness and Beyond

The travel today has been a little frustrating because of the weather.  There has been intermitent rain all day. That's the good news.... the next three days are forecast to have "heavy rain."

We travelled from Aberdeen north-west, inland and planned to visit a castle or two and then see the northern coast - all of which we did.  However, our luck with castles was not great.  The first was called Fyvie Castle, built in the thirteenth century.  It was magnificent, but we had arrived too early and could only walk around the outside and not see inside.  The second was called Findlater Castle, which we travelled over very narrow country roads out a carpark.  From there there must have been a long walk to the castle, as we could not see it from the carpark, and there were few trees.  It was raining and we decided to skip it and look for other castles later on our journey.  Perhaps it was well named, and we might well "find it later."

The northern coast is wild and wonderful, with many fishing villages, and some wonderfiul farmland.  We were impressed with the man-made harbours in many of these villages, some built several centuries ago.

We have now arrived in Inverness, a pretty city, near the coast and at the rivermouth of the Ness River.  Tomorrow we will drive the length of Loch Ness - I wonder if we will get to see the very famous fellow who many people believe lives in this loch (a type of long lake between to long ranges of hills).  Then we head to Scotland's largest city, Glasgow.

Have I mentioned the great rental car we travelling in  ...??  A brand new, black, European Ford Focus. It's a great mid-size car.  The multi-function on board computer tells me we are getting 56 miles a gallon (that will only make sense to older people) which means it uses very little petrol... actually it doesn't use any petrol because it's a diesel!  We have done nearly 300 miles (about 500km) so far on half a tank of diesel.  The only minor difficulty is that it is a manual and I haven't driven manual cars for a long time, but am quickly getting back into it.

Here are a couple of photos from today's journey.

Here I am outside Fyvie Castle.  It is really quite magnificent and is surrounded by beautiful gardens and a lovely lake.  It looks a little like something from a fairy tale .. perhaps Repunzel is sittng in the high turret waiting to be recued!

Here is an example of a man-made hrbour, built in the 17th Century, in order to give fishing boats shelter from the many storms experienced in the North Sea.  This one is part of the town of Portsoy.

In the town of Elgin we found the ruins of what was once a magnificent Cathedral.  Actually, many other people had found it before we did  . . .  but it was, nevertheless, a fantastic place to visit.