Marie's Adventures in the Highlands

Hello, all! I know I just got back from Italy, but here I am again... blogging. I went on a tour with an international student group last Saturday and Sunday. We traveled to Inverness and Loch Ness. Inverness is the town near the loch. The prefix 'inver' means the at the mouth of and the town of Inverness is at the mouth of the river Ness which feeds into the loch. Get it? Little vocab lesson there for you.
Want to know how it went? OK, I'll tell you. You are, after all, reading the blog... still... after three months (or so). I'm so proud.
Well we started out with some sun, but it didn't stick around. Both Saturday and Sunday were dreary and rainy, Sunday being the worse of the two. Now, when I went to Oban, we had the same tour guide and driver. She was great then. This time? Not so much. We took the scenic route up to the Highlands and my friend and I heard many of the same stories. Obviously, not everyone was on the same bus to Oban and some who were with us did not even go on that first trip. No big deal. I liked seeing the castles, small towns, bridges, etc. again. However, I heard nothing new for the first two hours of the trip.
Once we turned off of the route we had taken to Oban (because Loch Ness is further inland than Oban), I started to see different things. We obviously saw mountains and beautiful scenery. We stopped at Fort William for about an hour to eat lunch. That was all we had time for. We stopped a few places along the way, but honestly, they are hardly worth mentioning. One was a memorial to the Green Berets (which was sort of cool).
We passed Urquhart Castle on the way to Inverness and our tour guide said that we would see it the next day. OK, no big deal. We ate dinner in the town that night and in the morning, we were picked up at 9am for breakfast. Of course, we jumped ahead an hour at 2am that morning. No worries, though. I was punctual as usual.
After breakfast, we were taken up to an ancient burial ground. When I say ancient, I mean ancient. These burial mounds (made of stone, with standing stones in circles around them) are over 4,000 years old. That was pretty cool. We also hit up the battlefield at Culloden. It was interesting to learn that, within an hour, more than 1,000 Jacobite Highlanders were killed while the English government (on the other side of the fight) only lost a handful of men. Very moving, but we did not need to spend an hour there.
OK, so we get back on the bus, then. Dana and I are pumped for the castle. The tour guide gets out the microphone and starts talking about our next stop. Want to know what she said? Well, I'll tell you. "It's mostly ruins. Not really worth visiting." Not really worth visiting?! Of course it's worth visiting! That's why I wanted to see it! Because it's just ruins! It was blown up by the Jacobites because they knew they had to destroy it to keep it out of the hands of the English government! Cool, right? Well apparently not to our tour guide. I know I wasn't the only one miffed about that. We literally got out, walked to the parking lot, took pictures, and got back on the bus. That's it.
Remember how I said this trip was advertised to be for Inverness and Loch Ness? Yeah, wanna know how much time we spent on the Loch? About 20 minutes. The time it took us to take pictures of the castle is all the time we got.
After the castle, we went up to the Loch Ness Exhibition Centre, took a picture of the statue of Nessie they have in a little pond, and left.
That was it. We stopped in Pitlochry on the way back, though. We were only supposed to have 30 minutes, but two idiots decided to hold us up for 15 minutes.
I did take some good pictures. I know this post was more complaining and I'm sorry. But I really did have some good photo opportunities. Because of the weather, there was always fog and that just seemed to make things more magical.
Oh! Bit of trivia here... Want to know how big Loch Ness is? Well, it's about 22 miles long and only 1 mile across at it's widest point. But it's depth is humongous! If you took the Empire State Building and tipped it upside down at the surface, it would not touch the bottom of the deepest part of the loch. Oh and if you took all the water in Loch Ness, it would be more than enough to fill up all the lochs in the UK. Furthermore, that water could cover the surface of the earth more than three times. Cool, huh?
So that's about it, really. I got some neat pictures, but the trip itself was a bit of a disappointment, not to mention our tour guide.
Thanks for reading. I'll have more in two weeks after my trip to London and then around Italy! Ciao!

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