Scotland Day 3 - Travel to Loch Ness

This morning we didn't bother getting up early. I had a shower, but then someone else went in the bathroom after me, so Mauser couldn't use it (we didn't have an en-suite). We packed our bags, hung around doing nothing for a bit, then caught the bus towards the city centre.

We then walked to the bus station, which thankfully wasn't too far, with my annoying rolling case. We made sure we had plenty of time as we thought we might as well get there early since otherwise we would just be waiting at the hotel doing nothing. We caught the bus okay, and there were some really nice views on the way to Inverness. Big hills covered in colourful autumn trees and rivers winding their way through the hills. There was also one bit where there were a few fields of haybales with loads of pheasants in, and a few of the haybales had pheasants sitting on top of them. Unfortunately my camera 450D doesn't autofocus accurately enough for me, it always seems to front focus quite a bit. So I have been using liveview with contrast detect autofocus. But this didn't work either when shooting through the bus windows (the weather was dark and dreary, which probably didn't help either). So I didn't get any photos from the bus trip.

At Inverness we walked to the trains station, then waited round for ages for the car rental person. After a bit Mauser phoned them, and then they said they would come, as if they were waiting for us to phone them. But Mauser said it didn't say anything about needing to phone them on the booking email with all the details that they had sent him.

After getting the rental car, Mauser drove us to our B&B near Loch Ness. After meeting the lady who owned the guesthouse and getting all the info, we went out on a walk towards Urquart Castle, which the lady said would be nice for photos at sunrise or sunset.

But when we got to the castle, we found the hill was blocking the sun from lighting the castle (though the hill on the opposite side of the loch was lit). Also, there seemed to be no way to get to the castle except down a track that said no access. Looking inside the visitor centre (which was closed), Mauser saw there was some stairs inside the visitor centre that went down, so it must be that you have go down through a tunnel from underneath the visitor centre to get to the castle. Since the castle only opens at 9am, and closes at 4.30pm, I'm not sure how you'd get any nice sunset or sunrise photos of it? You can photograph it from above, but it's not a particularly great view in my opinion.

We then walked along the road for a bit, trying to find a footpath on Mauser's phone that looked like it went to the top of the hill. But we couldn't find it, so had to go back.

We went back towards the B&B, then carried on walking downwards as the B&B lady had said that there was a restaurant with decent food on the right. We didn't see the restaurant, but there was a walk around some woods at the bottom, so we did that. It was quite dark now though so we couldn't appreciate the autumn colour of the trees. On a post it had said there was no formal access to Loch Ness from the footpath, we found the informal access was by a fallen over tree that crosses a river. Mauser suggested we not try it as it wasn't worth me falling in trashing up my camera stuff or him falling in and trashing his phone. So we just carried on round the circular walk.

After walking through the forest we walked along the road a bit more to see if the restaurant was down there. Eventually we came out near the main village of Drumnadrochit. Walking up the road there was a pub called the Fiddler's Inn, but it was quite busy and looked like it only sold drinks, particularly Whisky. At the top of the road, I went left to see if there were any restaurants / pubs around there, while Mauser went to the right. I didn't find anything, only the entrance to Nessieland. Mauser found a restaurant in a hotel, but it was empty, and quite expensive. So we went back down the road and came to a take away, so we bought some Burgers and chips. Then we carried on down the road to the part of the village where our B&B was located. On the way we passed the restaurant the lady had said about, we thought she had meant it was right from the B&B, but she must have meant right from the south end of the road.

We managed to get back to the B&B before 8pm, and fill out our breakfast slips so we could have a nice cooked breakfast in the morning. We ate our dinner, Mauser had a Cheeseburger and I had a Chilli burger with Cheese. But my burger was exactly the same as Mauser, except that it had chilli sauce. Mauser said that he normally asks for Chilli sauce on his burgers, so a good thing he didn't, or it would have confused the bloke if he ordered a cheese burger, then said he wanted to make it into a chilli burger.

I copied the evening's photos to the laptop, then we went to bed quite early.