Wednesday, April 5, 2017

March 12th: Pretty Views (and Lots of Driving)

We got up the next morning, had breakfast in the hotel, and checked out. It would have been nice to spend more time in the area, but we only had a couple days left in Scotland and there was more to see. Time to get going!

We ran into a little bit of a traffic jam on the way to our first stop for the day. This was probably the most traffic we saw all morning. We eventually got past the sheep and made it to our first stop.

It was a little drizzly when we first got there, but the views were gorgeous. A little bit of muddy walking later...

...we got a peek at the Neist Point Lighthouse. It's on the far western side of the Isle of Skye. The rain started to let up after a few minutes...

...so we decided to follow the path down to the lighthouse.

The views were fantastic; you could see a couple waterfalls off in the distance. We somehow lucked out and were the only people there.

We picked our way down the path, passed a few sheep, and eventually made our way over the small hill and got a better view of the lighthouse.

I could have taken pictures of this scenery all day long.

These sheep didn't care about the view at all. We made our way back to the car just as a few groups of people showed up. Perfect timing!

We had a bit of driving to do to get to our next stop, so we said goodbye to the Isle of Skye and hit the road. The scenery was really pretty along the way, but after a while we needed a break to stretch our legs.

The Eilean Donan Castle sounded like a good stop! We didn't go into the castle itself, but we did use the restrooms and wander around the gift shop for a little while.

The castle was built in the 1200s, eventually fell into disrepair (and at one point, was apparently shot at with a LOT of cannons and basically destroyed) in the 1700s, and was rebuilt in the early 1900s. If we had more time I would have been tempted to go in, but we decided to save our money and time and keep going.

At one point we stopped for gas right across the street from the Ben Nevis distillery. It didn't look like they were open, though, so we just took a picture and kept going.

We were slowly getting closer to our next stop, but still had a bit further to go. I think this was somewhere along Loch Linnhe; we stopped for a few minutes at an overlook and wandered around to stretch our legs.

The scenery was pretty neat, so I took a few more pictures before we moved on. A little while later...

...we made it to our last stop of the day: Oban. It was very pretty.  :)

We checked into the hotel and decided to explore a little bit.

We had missed the last tour of the day at the Oban Distillery, but we did stop in their bottle shop before wandering through town a bit more. It was a Sunday afternoon, so many of the shops were closed, but it was still a nice walk.

We eventually wound up on the far end of town, down by the water. This bench had a pretty sweet view.


Mark saw a path off to the side, past the bench, so we followed it to see where it went. We thought about walking up to the castle, but it was pretty muddy so we started to wander back toward the hotel.

I loved the way the light filtered through the clouds.

The hotel's lounge looked out on the water, so we stopped for a drink and watched the sun set.

We thought about having dinner at the hotel, but we had passed a restaurant in town that looked pretty good so we went back there for dinner. It was a good choice...I had some kind of scallop salad thing that was amazing. We finished up with some Oban whisky and dessert, then wandered back to the hotel and spent a little time reorganizing our bags before heading to bed. We had a change of scenery planned for the next day!

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