Hey guys!
Here is the promised report from the Scottish part of our Great Britain trip.
We left Manchester and headed out to Glasgow where we also rented an appartment via Airbnb and from there we took off to all the other places. The first was Isle of Skye which was quite probably the craziest part of our road trip and everyone we told about this thought it was madness. The thing is this unbelievable island is situated about 6 hours away from Glasgow (by car!!) and the sun set in Scotland was at about 4 p.m. You can probably count for yourself what time we had to leave Glasgow to get at least two hours with some sun light!:D
We had no regrets though after visiting the island because what we saw there was an experience of a lifetime! We planned a short hike called Quiraing and we got up there we even saw some sunshine for about 20 minutes which was unbelievable – this doesn’t happen a lot over there (wikipedia says: “..in view of the fact that the weather doesn’t get very nice the place isn’t visited by too many tourists.”). After these astonishing 20 minutes the clouds came back again and it started raining so heavily we almost could not see a thing:D
We also visited the so-called Kilt Rock, rock cliff which looks like a Scottish kilt.
I know there are so many photos, I just couldn’t decide which ones to choose because they were all like from a different planet! I hope you don’t mind:)
Somewhere on our way from Skye we saw this castle, but unfortunately I don’t know the name or the exact location.
Another beautiful area we visited was Glencoe. This place was very autumn and instead of green carpets there were orange plains everywhere. We had a plan to hike the Three Sisters but it was supposed to rain all day so we just enjoyed the view from the rest areas along the road. It is an eight-hour hike all the way to the top of one the hills/mountains (?) you can see in the photos, but as you can tell we would probably have not seen a single thing for all the fog.
The next day we had to improvise since the rain was so heavy we couldn’t stand even 5 minutes outside. We decided to go to a coastal town called Aberdeen. We had some fun by the sea so we finally got some beach time!:D The waves were enormously big and one of them caught us off-guard so I can confirm that the sea in Scotland is ice cold in November.
On our way to Aberdeen we stopped at the oldest Scottish whisky distilleries where we even tried the tasting tour. Since it was quite early in the morning we didn’t really taste as many whisky kinds as they offered us:D
On the way back from Aberdeen we made a short stop at the Dunnotar castle which is quite possibly the most beautiful and photogenic I have ever seen. We got soaking wet again but the three-meters-tall waves were worth to watch! There is oen huge advantage to travelling in a weather like this – there is literally no one visiting so I can finally get some shots with no people in the way!:D
We saw the Scottish capital Edinburgh only with lights on once again even though we got there around 6 p.m. We climbed the Calton Hill which offered us magnificent view of the city. We even visited another Scotch store (to buy some gifts) only couple of meters away from the Edinburgh Castle.
I hope you like the photos. As I said before – I just didn’t know which ones to pick. I definitely want to come back to Scotland again, maybe in summer, even though the autumn rain is somehow typical for this part of Britain (if not for the whole country!).
And in two days we are leaving again! This time to Portugal where we will hopefully find some better weather! We fly in to Faro (do you know about the caves?!) but want to check out the southern parts of Spain as well as Gibraltar. Stay tuned!
Love, E.