Scotland ‘25
Shot on Fuji x-t4
October 1
After a restless 6 hours spent watching TSITP on the red eye flight, we landed in Edinburgh to the weather we were expecting for the next week. Good thing we packed our rain jackets!
Schedule
9AM: Landed in Edinburgh
10AM: Went grocery shopping for soap, snacks (too many), and much needed hot packs
11AM: Breakfast at Solas-Kitchen for some Scottish-Indian fusion drinks
12PM: Started our journey to Aviemore
Rothiemurchus
We booked a reservation for “quad trekking” on their website two weeks in advance, only because their farm visit was booked – thank god for that! We spent an hour riding through the farm lands, seeing highland cows up close and personal. One even licked Judy! And it might only be a fall thing, but there were fields full of purple flora and it was so beautiful!
3PM: Quad Trekking in Rothiemurchus
4PM: Browsed the gift shop
5PM: Checked in at Sweeney Aviemore One
Aviemore is a small town where everything we wanted to go to was within walking distance. We found out when we drove to our chosen restaurant for dinner, The Winking Owl, and it was two blocks away from our hotel…
We spent the next hour killing time by walking down the Main Street, only finding closed signs since apparently everything shuts down at 5PM in Scotland. The empty train station became our sanctuary in a town void of benches.
The first of many fish and chips and bowls of soup!
And then we went to sleep on this bench…
Jk this was just V at the Aviemore train station
October 2
5 minutes away from our hotel was The Coffee Pot, where we had another Scottish breakfast (mine was veggie this time and full of beans).
After some more gift shopping, we headed to Inverness. We roamed around the town as we waited for our next reservation…
At 1pm, we set sail on the Nessie Hunter into the Loch Ness. The lake was eerily calm despite the rain and reports of a storm approaching. We climbed up to the second level of the boat for better views but were met with slippery railings and raindrops in our face… so down again we went to the comfort of the inner cabin. No sightings of the monster this time!
Eileen Donan Castle
It was closed by the time we arrived so we took a quick bathroom break, Judy took us on a tour of her castle, and we were on our way to Portree.
For dinner we went to The Isles Inn. It was packed on this dark and stormy night, but we were able to get a table for 4 within 30 min. We got another fish and chips and soup combo, then had two desserts. One of which was a sticky toffee pudding which was SO YUMMY AND PERFECT.
Finally we arrived at our B&B around 10PM. It was quite late for our host but she still greeted us kindly!
October 3
Despite our late night, we had an early morning to hike The Old Man of Storr in the Isle of Skye. We took the longer, moderate route which took us about 2 hours out and back. It was quite beautiful but the fog held back some of the views :(
Google says this is the name of the cafe we stopped at — Untethered Highland Coo Viewpoint Cafe. V had seen it on TikTok and thankfully it was on our route back cause the hot coffee was amazing and the cows were so fluffy! They seemed to be comfortable with humans since they didn’t run away like the ones we saw before.
Since we arrived in Portree, all we heard was that there was going to be a storm coming (that originated by the Americas), so we had to readjust our itinerary a bit. We originally wanted to go to a lighthouse an hour away, but instead found the Fairy Glen was only a short drive from the coffee shop. It was such a whimsical place, and not much hiking was involved (thank god). It really looked like it was inhabited by fairies at some point — however these days it’s just full of sheep
In the truest sense of “calm before the storm”, the clouds cleared up and bestowed upon us a rainbow! The blue skies lasted only about 15 minutes and we were immediately caught in another rain storm with one and a half umbrellas (mine was broken).
Dinner was at the Caberfeidh Bar and Restaurant and it had the BEST pizza and drinks! We had a second round since we had to hibernate that night for the storm.
We got to the B&B around 8ish, just as the winds were beginning to pick up. The house sounded like it was creaking through the hurricane force gusts, but after a long day it only lulled us to sleep.
October 4
We woke up early again only so we could have breakfast from our B&B host. She was actually a nurse before becoming a full time host so she knew our struggle. Apparently they would have 8 weeks of vacation! And we thought we had it good with 5 lmaooo
Today was our driving day, a total of 7 hours back to Edinburgh. Our first leg was to Glencoe, 3 hours away.
We made many stops on the highway because the views were just gorgeous!
5 hours and a U-turn later, we arrived at the Three Sisters Viewpoint. The storm was still raging on in the form of high winds, which would come on so randomly, we had to remain on guard to brace ourselves lest we get pushed off the cliff.
There were so many fallen trees due to the storm overnight that our commute took two more hours than expected. We didn’t have any options for food like we thought we would at Glencoe (there was no power in any of the towns for most of the trip). With empty bellies and no internet, we pushed through