(Inverness)-Ullapool-Carbisdale

See? I told you I'd get back to this eventually.

It's only been two and a half weeks since my last trip pictures; that's not long at all, right?

Yeah. Eventually.







So, this is the conclusion of the Inverness day started... what, twenty days ago?

The above pictures were a random rest stop; I believe it was at Blackwater. Very pretty.


So, after we went to Loch Ness and Urquhart, we swung north. Since we weren't all that far from where we intended to stay (Carbisdale), we decided to follow the road up past Ullapool. We didn't go quite all the way to the northern coast, but we weren't that far off, and wandered along the west coast a fair while.







There were some of the most beautiful pictures you've ever seen, wandering lonely roads through the Highlands. Unfortunately, my camera couldn't take them. It doesn't always see eye to eye with me. But I did the best I could.





I have a Scottish joke now. It's my only joke.

What's the difference between A roads and B roads in Scotland?

Yeah, I can't tell you either.

Honestly, the same "A road" went from a dual carriageway to a single-lane pull-over-or-get-run-over avenue. And stayed that way for hundreds of miles. It was awesome, but a little harrowing sometimes.
Actually, this was arguably my favourite part of the whole trip. I loved exploring castles, and the lochs were just lovely, but that drive was wonderful. If I go nowhere else in my time here, I will go to the Highlands. The little lochs in the valleys were fantastically beautiful. Sometimes, we saw rolling hills on either side, but between them was a very wide, flat plain that could've been stolen from the prairies.



More than that, the hills just go on. It's beautifully bleak, and you can't imagine how such a tiny country could enclose such vastness. The heather doesn't seem to end. It's a glorious kind of loneliness. Not the sort of place I could stay forever -- I need trees now and again -- but it's a kind of solitude that I crave.



This was a random ruin. I can't remember the name of it, but it was sitting pretty in the middle of one of the aforementioned valleys, so we stopped to take a walk.

If I recall correctly, there was a sign warning us to stay on the path, because to either side was unpredictably marshy ground.

We didn't actually go right up to the ruin -- just close enough to take a few really good pictures. It was pretty.

Also if-I-recall-correctly, this picture below was from one of the lochs that was a loch, somehow, but reached in from the sea. Prettiful indeed.

Also if-I-recall-correctly, this picture below was from one of the lochs that was a loch, somehow, but reached in from the sea. Prettiful indeed. There were a number of places like this, where we were almost but not quite looking at the sea.


And I can't remember what bridge this is.

Yes, I know I should have labelled my pictures better -- or, do I hear it? done this sooner -- but I didn't. So there.

Ask Mom.

Do you want to know the real reason I add little comments like this all through? Because it makes it look like I knew what I was doing when I formatted these.

So if it starts to sound like I'm making stuff up, I probably am.

But there's nothing you can do about that.

An I recall aright, this is one of those aforementioned lochs/firths -- one of the most interesting ones. I like this picture a lot more than I should.

I took a picture of a Highland Cow around here, too, but you don't get to see it. I mostly took it on principle; just like you can't go to Scotland without tasting haggis, you can't go to the Highlands without taking a picture of a heilan' coo.

As much as I hated the kitsch cow merchandise, that T-shirt was cute.
I say that mostly because I love saying "heilan' coo."

Another fun thing about the compressed geography of Scotland is the coastline. As many people have pointed out, some places you get beaches so white that you'd think you're in the Caribbean (as long as you don't go outside). We didn't quite manage to see one of those, but in some places, the ferns and greenery managed to look just this side of tropical.



The variation you get in this place is awesome. Again to reiterate a fairly common statement, Scotland is like a really, really, really compressed Canada.

Except they don't have real mountains.

And these, to the last, are pictures of Shin Falls. They weren't real waterfalls. This is as high as they got. But although I wasn't able to get a picture, you could see the salmon jumping upriver over this last spot, which was neat.

And this concludes our tour for today. After Shin Falls, by which time I'd dozed off several times, we went to Carbisdale. More on that next post, because I'll ramble a bit and heaven forbid that I should ramble in an already long post.

Right.