Scotland

Gavin had another meeting in Glasgow, Scotland. Since the meeting was the day before Thanksgiving, we decided to spend the rest of the weekend in Scotland.

We stayed at a hotel called the Beardmore, which is connected to a hospital. I'm not sure why it's connected to the hospital because when we asked about it, the hotel said that most of their guests are there for business and not for the hospital.

We asked some people at the hotel what I should do in Glasgow while Gavin was in his meeting. They all told me to skip Glasgow and head into Edinburgh.

After Gavin's meeting, we drove north towards a small town called Fort William, where we stayed for the night.

Now, in Europe, there isn't a lot of fast food options. There are only a few chains, McDonalds, KFC, Subway, and Pizza Hut. We didn't want to stop long for lunch because it got so dark so early in Scotland (the sun set around 2), so we stopped at KFC at lunch. It was a surprise how much better the food was there than it is in the States.
Loch Lomond.
This is Loch Linnhe, which is near Fort William.

We have a suspicion that the hotel we were staying at was actually a nursing home. When we got there, there were several elderly people hanging out by the bar. The breakfast room looked exactly the cafeteria at the care center my grandma lived at. This was our Thanksgiving breakfast. We backed tracked a little to Ben Nevis, which is the highest point in the British Isles. We found a little waterfall right by the road.

We were heading to Loch Ness, but Gavin was insistent that he wanted to check out this stupid monument that this tiny city had. What he really wanted to do was surprise me with the Harry Potter train tracks. It's a really impressive structure.

It looked like there was some fun hikes around it, but it was too cold.

One of the things Gavin really wanted to see in Scotland was the highland cows. They are only found in Scotland and are really furry to survive the cold winters there. I love the long hair covering their eyes.

You might have to click on the picture to see them better. They are really cute cows.

Our next stop was Loch Ness to hunt down Nessie.

We loved the random waterfalls along the road.

The Scottish Highlands are a really pretty place.

We stopped at the Loch Ness Center for a minute. This is the original sub they used to look for Nessie.

Loch Ness.

We stopped at the Urquhart Castle, which is the midpoint of the lake.

The castle was built in 1230 A.D. Every hundred years or so, a wandering clan would come upon the castle, think it would be a nice place to live, fight the current clan living there, and the whole castle would have to be rebuilt. This happened 5 or 6 times. It was finally abandoned in 1689.

There were tours that would take you out on Loch Ness to look for Nessie, equiped with sonar to detect any movement deep down in the lake.

The kitchen area of the castle.

I searched so hard for Nessie. I was sure I was going to see her.

The Urquhart Castle probably had the prettiest setting out of all of the castles we have seen in Europe. Loch Ness is such a pretty lake.

A fighter jet flew over us while we were there.

A replica of the catapults they used there.

After Loch Ness, we drove north through the town of Inverness, which is where the play MacBeth takes place.

It got too dark for pictures after that, but we drove to Edinburgh and went looking for a place to have Thanksgiving dinner. Gavin wasn't feeling so well at this point, so we just grabbed something quick for me and headed to bed. It was certainly an interesting Thanksgiving. It hardly felt like Thanksgiving at all, but the Scottish Highland were so beautiful, it more than made up for it. :)