Nessie Hunting

Hello! Today Lauren and I made the journey to Inverness and Loch Ness.  When we got up this morning, we saw all of the damage that happened yesterday during the high winds (fun fact: We discovered last night that there was a travel alert out saying that we shouldn't travel to the Fife area (St. Andrews)...well it was a little late for that.  Oops).

This is what campus looks like right now.

Then, after picking up some Boots Meal Deal for lunch, we got on our train to Inverness.  The ride was really pretty.

Some of the scenery during the time that it wasn't raining.

Once we arrived in Inverness, we made our way to the bus station where our tour began.  (We decided to take a tour because there's no other way to get to Loch Ness unless you have a car.  So, instead of renting a car, we decided that a tour would probably be the best option.)  We took a tour called Temptation (they have other fun names such as Sensation, Inspiration, Enchantment, Freedom, Passion...you get the idea) by Jacobite tours.  We managed to find the bus easily enough where we met our tour guide, Kenny. 

Here's the bus and Kenny.  Kenny was a fun tour guide. He seemed to know a lot, but didn't feel the need to talk the entire time.

The first stop on our tour was to go to the harbor where we caught our boat that took us out on Loch Ness.  (See, I was so determined to find the Loch Ness Monster that I rented a boat...actually the boat came with the tour, but for 30 minutes that boat was 1/15th mine.)

This didn't fool me! I know it's not the real Nessie!

Here's our boat.

The boat ride was a lot of fun.  It took me a little bit of time to get used to how rocky the water was, but after that it was all good.  Unfortunately, we didn't see Nessie.  I think that Jacobite should really look into making Nessie sightings happen on their tour.

Here's Loch Ness from the boat.

We got a great view of Urquhart Castle from the water.  So, I took a video of it.

On our tour, we got visit to Urquhart Castle.

Here's the inside of the boat.

Luckily for us, the weather cleared up about the time that we got to the castle. 

Just incase you wanted to see the boat again...

We looked around the castle for about an hour.  It was a great time!  The sun came out and everything.  The views of Loch Ness were awesome! Sorry, but I'm posting lots of pictures at the castle because of how nice the weather was.

 After the castle, we took the Jacobite bus back into Inverness.  Luckily, the weather held out for us there too.

Inverness

The castle of Inverness (it was also a prison and court house evidently).

After getting back into Inverness, we walked around for a while before getting our train to Perth. The train was really nice.  We saw lots of deer randomly enough.  Lots of deer.  Like at least 50 deer.  It was really cool.

Here are the deer...I promise that they're deer.  I know it's hard to tell by this picture.

Then, we got our train from Perth (which was really cold for some reason) to Stirling.  Tomorrow Lauren leaves, which is sad.  But it was nice to have her here and I think (she told me I can say know) that she really enjoyed seeing Scotland. Hopefully the ash cloud (which by the way, I don't understand how there is this mysterious ash cloud above us and I can't see it, but it's still causing havoc.) doesn't cause any problems.