Inverness Youth Hostel

There's been a heavy dew overnight and the tent is soaked again.  Luckily the sun comes out so I dry it as much as possible and then tie it to the outside of my pack again, turning it over as I go.  

Looking at the route suggestion for today, I see that it heads around to Dingwall before heading back to Inverness.  I'm sure that this is pretty (although it still involves a lot of walking on major A roads) but it's also long and it still doesn't avoid the very busy North Kessock bridge ...

Today has been a more relaxed pace, although we have hoofed it more today than any other day. We chose not to drive in the Inverness Traffic today.....actually AJ would not let CS drive today. Declaring it a car free day! So we walked into the city centre - only about 2 or 3km from the Youth Hostel. We then caught a bus - Jacobite Tours and had a very comical bus driver - Donald who took us to the wharf for our boat cruise. The cruise consisted of Nessie Searching on the loch. We then sailed ...

So Louise and I headed off to Inverness which would be another few hours drive. On the way we would run into Loch Ness... where the Loch Ness Monster, or more affectionately known by the Scots as "Nessie". A Loch is a lake I discovered thus far. I'm catching on fast to Scotish slang. On the drive, we stopped off at more memorials for WWI and WWII and Urqust Castle . The winds or "gales" were out of control and very freaky. We saw that a boat was taken by the winds at South Lagan. We got out a...

So we finally made it to Inverness, checked into the hotel and made our way to the Street Festival. The Prime Minister of Scotland, Jack O'Connel was there to launch the event with a huge firework display. The theme of the festival was "monsters"... don't know why, just was. There were costumed monsters all over and of course bagpipers marching around. Louise and I ended up following the pipers all night getting us into the pubs as their entourage. Louise was relentless in striking a deal wit...

This weekend I was working at the Mitchell Trophy swim meet in Inverness - naturally I took the opportunity to take some photos along the way :)

Unfortunately the weather on the way up was far from the best. There was a grim moment somewhere in the middle of the A9 (pretty much the only straight road there) where a lorry had crossed the central reservation and we were held up for about 45 mins, and all I could see was literally mist and rain. Thankfully I had my CD player or else it co...

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