Day 20 (Tuesday)
We start heading south now as this is our last week in the UK, my how the time has flown!! We are off to Edinburgh today, about 3 hours away from Loch Ness.
We decided to go Inverness on the way through, which is North of where we were. Gav needed a doggy magnet of Loch Ness. After tracking down the visitor centre we went in and got a magnet along with our first purchase for the baby, a Heilan’ coo t-shirt (you need you Scottish accent to get it).
We then headed down to Edinburgh. About an hour into our trip we heard on the radio that there was an accident that had closed the motorway in the direction we were heading just north of Perth.
So our options were to head back up to Aberdeen (about an hour back in the other direction then head south again) or inland to Fort Williams and then South. We opted to head inland and then south, this was now a 4 hour trip from where we were.
On the bright side as we were driving we passed through Lochaber. A few Christmas’ ago Gav and I got Gav’s parents a block of land in the Lochaber Highland Estates, http://www.lochaberhighlandestates.com/.
We then drove right pass the area where the block is, we were unable to stop due the traffic, a lot of people had been diverted and we were on single carriage way.
We eventually made it through to Edinburgh although upset the GPS several times as we were unable to make most of the turns due to road works. After dinner we walked up to the castle, the lines were massive for the Tattoo.
There were some scalpers there, Gav was talking to them about tickets, as usual I spoiled all the fun. I was not willing to pay double for tickets. Plus we were exhausted from our 6 hour drive.
As I was about to doze of listening to sounds of the bag pipes in the back ground they fired the canons. We both almost leapt out of bed and Gav almost broke my hand when he squeezed it!!
Day 21 (Wednesday)
At breakfast today Gav decided to have smoked kippers for breakfast. Thanks to my super pregnancy smelling senses I was put off my breakfast almost immediately. I almost considered taking my breakfast in our room.
After breakfast we walked up to the castle and had a look around. Pretty standard castle stuff; towers, dungeons, etc. Gav was happy as this castle had been attacked several times in its life.
After a day of walking around the castle we headed back to the hotel, had some dinner and went to bed and waited to be woken by the canons again.
Tomorrow we keep heading south, back to Manchester. Lets hope Gav doesn’t fall down the stairs again!!!