Thanksgiving Travels: Scotland

November 27-30
We booked our trip to Scotland pretty last minute. We were waiting on Norah’s passport to make any definite plans.

After weeks of waiting, Norah's passport arrived!

We were hoping to go to Poland mainly because airfare was so cheap but by the time Norah’s passport arrived, airfare had skyrocketed. So we decided to stay within the UK and plan a trip to Scotland instead and ended up not needing our passports to travel anyways. We took the train from Peterborough, which is about a 40 min drive from our house. Our train left at 7:46 on Thanksgiving morning, so we were up bright and early. Who am I kidding, I’m up bright and early most days anyways. I never truly go to bed. Norah is quite the morning girl. She is full of all kinds of smiles for us in the morning, which make those long nights a little bit easier to recover from. It was about a 3.5hr train ride to Edinburgh. Our last trip before Norah was born, was to Edinburgh - so we were familiar with the train ride and couldn’t help smiling when we recalled sleeping almost the entire way there last time and booking the “quiet coach”. Now, we were just trying to keep Norah quiet enough not to disturb the rest of the coach and figure out the fastest, easiest way to the train car with changing facilities. Parenthood has certainly shifted our focus, but we are absolutely loving it and determined to share our travels with Norah! Thanksgiving dinner for us consisted of ham sandwiches on the train.

All tuckered out on her 1st Thanksgiving.

   Once in Edinburgh, we caught another local train to an an area outside of the city to Edinburgh Park to the car rental place. We booked a car through Arnold Clark and were able to get a 10% discount through the tour itinerary we bought before the trip. Typically, we decide where we are going and I check out a book on my kindle or at the library and start doing research on where we want to go and what we want to see. Since we weren’t able to do that this time around, we bought an itinerary through Secret Scotland. I found the site through a travel group we are part of on Facebook as it was recommended by someone that had gone to Scotland and used it. We bought the “Crazy Tour” - an itinerary for 3 days from Glasgow to Edinburgh. They called it the crazy tour because it was not recommended to try and see so much of Scotland in that short of time, but we knew 3 days was all we really had and decided to try to see as much as we could.
Once set up with our car, we headed for Glasgow. We decided not to stop in Glasgow. Now that winter is upon us here in the UK, we truly felt like we were chasing daylight the entire trip with sunrise after 8am and sunset between 3 and 4pm. Once through Glasgow, we headed along the itinerary route towards Glencoe - our destination for the evening. We weren’t able to see much of anything as the weather was quite dreary with dense fog and mist and then eventually darkness from sunset. Our initial goal was to get to the Loch Lomond area and try to see Loch Katrine in the Trossachs area. We must have missed a turn at some point because we couldn’t seem to find it. It was okay though, we ended up at another recommended place, The Scottish Wool Centre in Aberfoyle. We took the time for tea for 2 and explored the touristy shop.

We made some purchases here and were impressed by the really great prices of things. Aaron found Norah a sleeper that said, Baby-ness on it with a little Loch Ness monster for £5! The employees of the store just loved Norah (and her blue jeans) and she was handing out smiles to them, so naturally they loved her even more after that!
The first night, we stayed at The Glencoe Inn. They had a restaurant at the hotel but the chef was feeling ill, so we ended up getting something eat from the fish and chippy nearby. Our room was nice and simple with a playpen for Norah to sleep in. We had a difficult time finding rooms within our price range so last minute which is odd now that we have traveled there and back because things were pretty quiet in Scotland with tourist season seemingly over. I can’t imagine what the prices of rooms are like during peak summer season. The next morning, we made sure to go to breakfast as early as possible so that we could get started on the road towards Isle of Skye! Breakfast was a traditional English breakfast which we have yet to grow to really love. Lots of salty things! Aaron was able to try haggis and I had a small bite too. According to Wikipedia, haggis is the national dish of Scotland and is a savoury pudding containing sheep's pluck (heart, liver and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally encased in the animal's stomach and simmered for approximately three hours.

The view from our table at breakfast was great and a good indication of the sights we were about to see! We’ve quickly learned that having a baby often draws all kind of attention our way. Norah is constantly marveled at and this trip certainly didn’t disappoint! We packed things up and headed towards Fort William and then onwards to the Lochalsh area.
The awesome part of this itinerary is that it took us on the “back roads” of Scotland. We didn’t spend much time at all on the main motorways which was exactly what we wanted. The drive towards Fort William was foggy in areas and then it would clear up in others. We stopped at the Commando Memorial which commemorates the elite WWII soldiers who did their intensive combat training in the hills around Spean Bridge between 1940 and 1945.

Because of the fog, we missed out on seeing Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland and the UK. We drove on towards the Lochalsh area and took a short detour to Ratagan Pass.

 One of the best viewpoints in Scotland is the Ratagan Pass. From the Pass, you have a panoramic view of the mountain range known as the Five Sisters of Kintail. The local legend behind these mountains tells the story of seven sisters. Two of the sisters were married to two Irish brothers who promised that their brothers would return to marry the remaining Five Sisters. When it became apparent that the remaining sisters would have a long wait, a local witch turned them into stone to preserve their beauty. The views were absolutely amazing and the pictures that Aaron captured could easily pass for postcards!
                     
                           
 From Ratagan Pass, we continued onwards and stopped for a little bit at Eilean Donan castle, one of the most photographed casltes in Scotland. For good reason too, Aaron was able to get some pretty good pictures here too!

Once crossing over the Skye Bridge onto Isle of Skye, we decided to attempt to get to Old Man of Storr before sunset. Once there, we realized we would have to do an awful lot of climbing to actually get there but we were able to see it from a distance just fine. Old Man of Storr is an unusual geological feature, which has created a sharp pinnacle of rock. Nearby was Lealt Falls and Kilt Rock. The sun was quickly disappearing on us so we went to Kilt Rock first.

Once there and out of the car, we noticed a search and rescue team with a distraught couple. I overheard one man say, “He was just trying to get back up off the ledge.” I also saw someone offer the woman a packet of sugar to help calm her nerves. We weren’t sure what happened and hoped it wasn’t anything serious. Later that night, Aaron searched for a news article and found this. https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/islands/western-isles/415722/dog-falls-200ft-death-skye-cliff-plunge/ The poor dog was off his leash and plunged over the side of the cliff. We got some really nice pictures here and Norah was able to get some fresh air. She spent a lot of time in her car seat on this trip but I must say, she had the life and enjoyed every bit of all the napping that she got to do!

Lealt Falls was next, I took care of feeding Norah while Aaron explored and got some more really great pictures.

We headed to Broadford and settled in to our hotel for the night, Dunollie Hotel. There was no wifi in the rooms here, so we spent some time in the lounge and got lots of looks while trying to entertain Norah. We ordered pizza for the evening. Having Norah with us at such a young age makes it tough to eat a sit down meal. She’s often a ticking time bomb and goes from smiling and content to screaming in a matter of seconds some times. So we looked at it on the bright side as we were saving lots of money not eating out as often as we usually do while traveling!
On Saturday, we wanted to take advantage of being on Isle of Skye and get to see a little more of it before heading onwards to Inverness and Loch Ness. So we drove to Glen Brittle and stopped to hike to the Fairy Pools which are a series of smoothly rounded rock pools carved by swirling boulders.

I hadn’t packed any sneakers for the trip and for good reason. I was able to fit all of our things into a carry-on suitcase and two backpacks, so there wasn’t any wiggle room with packing an extra pair of shoes. It made for the hike to the Fairy Pools quite rough though in my flimsy white canvas shoes. We crossed several brooks and I was convinced that I would slip and fall by the end of things. Aaron had Norah in the carrier seeing that his footing was a lot more secure than mine. We hiked for quite a long time and could have even went further but decided to turn back after seeing the first set of fairy pools. Our pictures don’t really capture the beauty of them but they were pretty spectacular.

After leaving Isle of Skye we backtracked for just a bit and then headed towards Inverness. We stopped briefly at Urquhart Castle, which is the castle that appears in all of the iconic images of Loch Ness. Then we went to the Loch Ness Exhibition Centre, which we both enjoyed very much.

It really left you to wonder what is really out there in Loch Ness; however, it also disproved some of the more common myths. No sightings of the monster but Aaron was definitely on the lookout.

We passed through Inverness and ended our day at our destination for the evening in Carrbridge at the Cairn Inn. We were able to eat at their restaurant and had some really great, fresh food from there. The breakfast the next morning was pretty great too! We were actually the only guests at the inn that night, which was pretty neat and nice to know that if Norah was crying at any point, she wasn’t disturbing anyone.
The next morning the owner of the inn was able to give us some suggestions on things to see on our drive back to Edinburgh. We were grateful for his suggestions because the intinerary was overwhelming with all of its things listed to do. We had a tough time picking what we wanted to see most. First, we took a short walk to see Carrbridge’s “Packhorse Bridge”.

The bridge, built in 1717, is the oldest stone bridge in the Highlands. It was severely damaged in the "muckle spate" (whatever that means) of 1829 which left it in the condition seen today. Then we drove towards Bruar and stopped at the House of Bruar, an upmarket shop specialising in country clothing, woollen wear, tweeds etc. We also took a short walk to the Falls of Bruar, where there was an arched stone bridge and waterfall.

After that, we went onwards to Queen’s View which offered amazing panoramic views of Loch Tummel.

By then, we had to start thinking about getting to Edinburgh to catch the train home. We really wanted to go to Hermitage where some of the tallest trees in the UK can be found along with some waterfalls but decided to start heading for Edinburgh. Almost 30 min from our destination, we got caught in accident and construction related traffic and were at a crawl for more than an hour. We were getting quite nervous about making our train in time which left Edinburgh at 4p. We had to drop the car off and catch a train from Edinburgh Park to Edinburgh and then get to our platform. We dropped the car off at 335pm. Literally ran to the Edinburgh Park. Aaron had Norah in her car seat and his back pack and I had the suitcase and my back pack. It was probably quite comical to watch as we were running for our lives. We caught the at Edinburgh Park at 352pm and arrived at Edinburgh at 403pm. We were 3 minutes late to catching our train home. So we had to go to the customer service counter and book entirely new train tickets. It was quite depressing (and not cheap). So we settled on a bench to watch for the platform number of our updated train and I went to go to the bathroom just as Aaron realized the train they booked for us was at 420pm! It was then 412, so we quickly gathered our things and ran to the platform and boarded the train at 416 and it left very shortly after that. Norah was clearly amused during the entire ordeal bc she remained calm just until we got on the train. She decided to be miserable for the next couple of hours as we journeyed home and I don’t blame her! We finally made it home just an hour later than our original expected arrival.
It was definitely a crazy idea to do the route we did in 3 days and we easily could have spent a week exploring Scotland. Such a beautiful place and such a great trip! Norah is a wonderful traveler and now that she has her passport, we are going to try conquering the airplane next!