On Saturday morning, we walked to the rental car office a couple of blocks from our hotel, put our luggage in the back, and got in the car. Ben, the driver, did initially try to get in on the left-hand (American) side, but he realized it pretty quickly and went over to the right.
Getting out of Edinburgh was somewhat of an adventure. We immediately had to go through two roundabouts, and naturally had no idea what to do or where to go and got lost. Fortunately, Edinburgh is not really that big of a place and we had basic maps, so we just kept driving away from the city center and eventually found the motorway (British equivalent of our interstate). It turns out that the hard part about driving on the other side is not really being in the opposite lane, but being on the opposite side of the car. Ben had sort of a hard time staying near the center line, and I kept worrying he was going to smash me against the cars parked on the side of the road. But he didn't, and we made it into the countryside safely. Thank goodness.
We headed north for about three hours toward Inverness, which is the only city of any real size in the Highlands. Just outside Inverness is Culloden Moor, where Highlanders fought the English in the last battle for Scottish independence in 1746. More importantly, Culloden is a huge plot point in Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series, which is one of my favorite things on earth. So I made Ben go there to check it out.
We had some confusion exiting the motorway due to not understanding the signage - it belatedly occurred to us that we should have brushed up on what all the British road signs mean. And then we were suddenly, unexpectedly faced with our first Single Track Road. Really, someone should tell you about single track roads before handing you the keys to a rental car in Scotland. These roads are about as wide as your average country dirt road, but have two way traffic. Every so often there are small places on the side of the road to pull over if someone is coming in the opposite direction, so you just sort of have to drive along and hope nobody comes at you when you're driving up over a hill. Fun! Eventually we got used to them but when it came out of nowhere we were sort of taken aback.
Anyway, our first sight upon exiting the car at Culloden were these shaggy highland cows.
Culloden itself is very quiet and somber, just a huge field with markers around the edge indicating positions of the troops and giving information about the battle.
The Outlander guy was a Fraser, hence:
The Clan Fraser gravestone had quite a few coins left on top in memorial. I checked the other clans' stones and no one else had more than one or two - so clearly there are a lot of Outlander nerds going to Culloden Field. It's not just me!
They had all the books in the gift shop!
Okay, that's enough of that.
From Culloden we drove to Inverness, only about six miles away. I didn't really know what to expect from Inverness, but it was gorgeous. The River Ness runs right through the middle of town.
We stayed at the Macrae Guest House, which was very nice and in a great location right on the river. We had a funny conversation at breakfast there with two Scottish women who were complaining about how they apparently have a large influx of Polish laborers who are moving to the Highlands "and they don't even bother to learn English!" Sounded kind of familiar.
Inverness Castle is not ancient - it dates only to the 1830s - and is not open to the public. It wasn't really very impressive in the light but looks nice at dusk.
We went for curry again Saturday night. The restaurant (Sam's) came highly recommended in our Lonely Planet book and it really was great. The service again, though, was not. Our waiter was kind of mean. We were also starting to finally get that in Britain if you don't ask for the check they will let you sit there for ages. Maybe forever, I don't know.
After dinner we did the Ness Islands Walk, which is a path along the river and across some islands back to the other side. It was peaceful and felt safe, even though by the time we got back to our B&B it was pretty dark.
On our walk we did see an Elderly Persons warning sign - we had seen one earlier in the day and laughed about it, and ended up seeing these all over the Highlands. Funny!
It was supposed to rain the next day, so instead of staying around Inverness and doing some hiking we decided to just go for it and head out to the Isle of Skye off Scotland's west coast.
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