Day 6 : 2025 07 04 A Tour Of Fog

It's rainy, it's windy, there is kind of visibility you usually see in a airplane disaster film right before the co-pilot says 'these instruments can't be right..'. So, naturally, it's the perfect day to go on a 12 hour bus tour of the highlands. In our defense, this was the only day available, and relying on weather forecasts in Scotland that look any further than say, 15 seconds is just courting disaster.

We treck out to the, in retrospect, very clearly marked bus station building and take a smallish bus with a tour guide sporting a kilt and, as we find out over 12 hours, an indefatigable supply of anecdotes, stories and histories to regale us with.

The scenery was lush, if a bit obscured, the stories varied. One was about the Scottish mythology of the Kelpies. Horses that run along the shore of lochs and lure young children to ride on their back, then drag them to their watery grave and eat them. This, he reasoned, was the old timey answer to having a PSA about the dangers of playing near large lakes as children unattended. Night terrors and aversion to horses were just fanciful byproducts, I assume.

We then drove past some massive, 30 m tall Kelpies, which were supposed to represent the power and industry of Scotland. Meant to bring to mind the plough horses and canal horses working away. Apparently Kelpies were also very strong but I suppose it's of no use to mention you also made a 30m tall sculpture to the power of early childhood psychological trauma.  They were quite pretty, though.

Here is a sign at the first bathroom/food stop. Taken here to note that dogs were allowed everywhere. Buses, pastry shops, you name it, you would see a dog just chilling with their owner. It can only speak well of a country that allows dogs everywhere.

We saw aqueducts, or .. old train bridges. The tourist guide pointed this out specifically to tell us that, no this is not he one referenced int he Harry Potter movies.

There are many fantastic views and vistas which have clear parking areas that we simply zoom by, as the views that they are featuring as we pass them is some grass and very, very dense fog. We are making record time! Which is not something you want to hear when, in this case, the journey IS the destination.

One place we do stop that is literally and figuratively breathtaking is the Three Sisters. They really are as beautiful as you'd imagine in person. That and the storm level winds whipped cold rain across you face making it actually rather hard to catch your breath as you took it all in. It was some temporary respiratory problems well worth having.

Eventually we stop at a visitor's centre. It has a period era accurate thatched roof. Looking at the rain and wet and the darkness of the hut and thinking the most they'd have to read was maybe some Bible tracts, one can understand why families had four or more kids back in the day. In the building proper there was a cafeteria, a gift shop, and a very well plaqued presentation centre featuring the geology of the area. Apparently, and this is news to me, my plaque reading voraciousness draws a very solid, and emphatic line at reading Geology. Rocks, not so much, apparently.

We finally end up at Loch Ness, and are apparently the only people in the busload of 30 or so people who decline the boat trip. We wander about the charming town. My son, who has regained his appetite after having the memory of Gardy Loo! fade from his brain, has his lunch. Then asks for a second lunch. One of the few things I know I MUST do as a parent is feed my children. I oblige him with some fair trade fresh locally sourced fish and chips, which is a very long way of saying Expensive Fish and Chips. But his renewed appetite polishes that off without a wink.

At the town are these charming locks.. to be more accurate at the loch are these locks. Water elevators for folks going from one body of water to the next. We look about and wander over to the loch itself. It's remarkable clear. And featured some of the most fearless ducks, or, more accurately, some of the most well fed from tourist ducks ever. As they walked directly to us and kind of muddled about our feet.

It was then that our daughter, who was in Korea for a month, phoned us over.. some social media app. We had a lovely video call all the while wondering at the loch and the entirely too friendly ducks. It's still a marvel to me that here we are, in the middle of, if not nowhere then at least Rather Out of the Way. And she is in across the WORLD, and we are talking to her ina  VIDEO CALL. With maybe a 1 second delay. There are stil things that never cease to amaze me. And the ducks were pretty cool too.

This was some bar named after the Bothys. The only reason I took this picture was to remember to tell this neat fact. Bothys are stone huts scattered across the countryside, meant to be communal shelter for shepherds. But as the need to shelter shepherds in the middle of nowhere has dwindled, these have turned into just communal shelter for anyone camping about. They are not supplied with any, perhaps well water. And often there is someone else there. So you are sharing these stone cottages with strangers, other campers, in the middle of nowhere. Frankly sounds like the premise for a moderately successful horror franchise, but it's just what is done here. It was both a little unnerving and heartwarming at the same time. A little like the forward ducks, if I'm being honest.

Our last stop is at another tourist centre with a few genuine Hairy Highland Coos. Highland cattle with dashing bangs and the sort of charming horns that you realize are really quite lethal when you get up close. They apparently were originally black, but a few red ones were brought around for, I think some royalty. And the red heads exploded in popularity, leading them to be what we assume all Hairy Coos to be. Something like the modern day carrot. But again, with adorable bangs and disemboweling horns.

We end the day with burritos because when you travel sometimes you just have to go with the cheapest option. The Canadian dollar has never been strong and in Europe the sticker shock just kinda stays with you and you float in a financial half coma for most of the trip, dazed and in a fog not unlike the one we drove through for 12 hours.