Scotland Trip!

I flew into the Dublin airport Tuesday June 26th from Boston, and waited in Terminal 1 for my brother and mom. I did not even have time go to back home, we were going to Scotland about 3 hours after I got there. We met and went to our gate, It was just about a 1 hour flight to Edinburgh. Once we got there, we tried to find the place where we could get our rental car, but then we realized that we weren't due to pick up our car until 2 days later. That meant we had to get a Taxi to our Air B&B so thats what we did. Our Air B&B was right on the royal mile, which is a street about 1 mile long that runs through the Old Town. It connects the Edinburgh Castle with the Holyrood Palace. 

The first thing that we did was just walk around the town a bit. We walked down some streets to reach a main part in the city where we visited a structure called the Scott Monument. It looks like this:

We found out that we could actually climb it, and that there are a total of 287 steps. We began to climb, and towards the very top, it got more and more narrow. There were amazing views from the top of the monument, we could see in each direction. 

 

After we finished climbing all of the 287 stairs of the monument, we began our journey down the stairs. We next wanted to  

We went to dinner at a Mexican restaurant called Pancho Villas. I got enchiladas, my brother got taquitos and my mom got 3 tacos. It was a very good meal.

The next day was Wednesday. I woke up around 9 AM and we went out first thing to go and look around the campus of Edinburgh University. It opened in 1584. 

 

The campus was very beautiful. All of the buildings looked very cool, and the Edinburgh University Library is one of the most important libraries in Scotland. It holds over 3,800,000 books, e-books and e-journals in total. Around the campus are a few meadows and gardens. 

This is a picture of the student union, the oldest in the world at Edinburgh University.

Sometime that morning while we were walking around, we found a quick place to have some Breakfast / Lunch. I got a breakfast that had 3 pancakes, some eggs, sausages and some bacon. It was very delicious. 

Levi got waffles with ice cream for breakfast. It was full of sugar but it was very delicious because I had some of his meal. There was chocolate syrup all over and the little chocolate things on his waffle are actually pieces of crystallised honey covered in chocolate.

At Noon, there was a free harry potter tour that was departing from next to the National Museum of Scotland. We went to the meeting point right after we all finished eating. We got there around Noon and then this guy showed up wearing a black cloak and got us all organized and began to lead our tour. The first place we stopped was in a graveyard named Greyfriars Kirkyard. The reason we stopped there was because JK Rowling got some inspiration for her characters names from the graveyard. For example in the graveyard, there is a man buried named Thomas Riddell, and this inspired the name Tom Riddle which was changed to Riddle just because its more mysterious since the word 'Riddle'. There is also a man buried named William McGonagall which inspired Professor McGonagall. 

We then ventured on to potterrow port. It is a small underpass under a street where you can walk under in order to 'cross' the road, or cross under it. It is said that JK Rowling walked under this a lot and that is how she got the inspiration for the scene where Dudley and Harry are attacked by dementors in the 6th book. 

Below is an image of the scene in the movie:

We also got to see some of the places where JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books. One was called The Elephant House, and she wrote books 2-4 there. Another was called the spoon, which is where she started writing the 1st book.

 

We ended our tour on Victoria street which is where JK Rowling got her inspiration for Diagon Alley. It is a colorful street with many shops, and at the end is a bank, which can relate to gringots bank in the Harry Potter books. 

The top 2 pictures are pictures of Victoria street, and the bottom picture is from the movie. After the tour, we had a little rest at a nearby shop and got some juices and smoothies. After we were refreshed we went on to see the Edinburgh Castle. We walked around some buildings and ended up at the bottom of a set of stairs that we had to climb to reach the castle. 

It is right on the edge of this large mountain side so its almost on a cliff. Here is a picture of it from the internet:

From the picture above, it really reminds me of hogwarts:

Unlike most people believe, she did not get her inspiration for hogwarts from this castle, but actually from a school next to Greyfriars Kirkyard (the cemetery I mentioned earlier). The school is called George Heriot's School. This is an image of it:

Here are pictures we got at Edinburgh Castle:

The view from the top of the castle was amazing also.

We spent about an hour and a half or so exploring the castle. We then went back down and started to walk back to our house on the royal mile. On the way, we spotted an attraction that was a world of illusions attraction so we went and visited that. There were a lot of whacky and trippy illusions in this building, as well as many hands on things to do. In one room they had these 4 stations where you could control cameras that were outside of the building, so you could basically just see what people were doing on the street and spy on them. The major attraction in this building was at the top which was called Camera Obscura. This is latin for 'dark room' and "is the natural optical phenomenon that occurs when an image of a scene at the other side of a screen (or for instance a wall) is projected through a small hole in that screen as a reversed and inverted image (left to right and upside down) on a surface opposite to the opening." We went in, and a picture of the outside was being reflected on a round wooden table. He controlled what we were able to see with a long stick that stretched up to the roof of the room. It was a really cool thing and I still don't fully understand how it worked it seemed like magic to me. 

We walked home after we went through all of that building. Around 6 PM, my Mom booked reservations for us at a restaurant called Lovage for 7 PM. We went to a nearby Tesco at around 6:20 PM to get Levi some stuff for dinner because this restaurant had more fancy food that Levi probably wouldn't like. After we got some food at Tesco we went back home quickly to drop off Levi, then we went to our reservation at 7 PM. 

We decided to get all 5 starters and just share all of them, so it was kind of like a small tasting menu instead of each of us getting a starter and a main course. 

This was a watermelon gazpacho

These were duck dumplings

Delicious scallops with greens and all sorts of flavors

This dessert included some avocado flavored ice cream!

Before we walked back to our house, we went to visit the Writers Museum. 

Thursday morning we all woke up around 7:30 AM so that we could get an early start to the day. We also had to get up so that we could go and get a rental car that we were going to use for the rest of our trip. We got all of our luggage since we were moving to another Air B&B and got a Taxi to Green Motion, the place we would pick up our rental car. 

Once we got there, it took a while but we eventually got our car and then we began to drive to Stirling Castle which was about a 45 minute drive from Edinburgh. The car we got was really nice, it was a Peugeot which is a french car, and had lots of dope technology. We drove northwest of Edinburgh and then arrived at Stirling Castle. This castle dates back to the 12th century, but most of what remains today dates back to the 15th and 16th century. 





Attached to this castle is the Royal Cemetery that Levi and I were able to check out. There were some really nice views of it from the castle. It was very large and looked pretty in the sunlight. 

It was a really sunny and hot day Thursday. The hottest point during the day was 31 celsius, which is about 88 Fahrenheit. We went back to our car after we visited the cemetery. Next we started to drive to Pitlochry which is a very small town with a population of about 3,000 people. It took us about 90 minutes to drive there from Stirling Castle. 

Here is a good online picture I chose that shows how small and cozy this town is.

We did a lot of walking around the town and through the woods. We went to a tourist information place and asked what we should do and were given a very good route that we could walk to see some cool things. We walked from the main town off towards the Pitlochry Dam and fish ladder. We crossed this one bridge that looked like a mini golden gate bridge, it was very cool and wobbled a bit when we walked over it. 




We walked on the water for a bit over the layers of rocks that made up the shore. We walked closer and closer to the Dam until we had to get back on the path so we could actually take the real route. 



The fish ladder was way bigger than the small one in Grand Rapids. Walking on top of the Dam, we saw a spot where kids were jumping off of the shore into the water off of a sort of concrete block cliff thing. It didn't look that high but it looked fun. We decided to go over and I jumped in a couple times, but Levi did not. It was very fun, considering it was about 88 degrees it cooled me off. We then walked down a path in the forrest to a more calm shore where we had a break. The sun was shining very bright and Levi's face got a bit red. 



We walked back to the town and found our car. We still wanted to see a waterfall in Black Spout Wood, which is a forrest close to the town. We drove as far as we could, then we had to walk another 500 yards to reach the look out point. The waterfall was visible down through all of the surrounding trees.



We still had about 2 hours more to drive to get to our final destination for the night, where our next Air B&B was. The place is called Inverness, and is a small city in the Northern part of Scotland. We got there after a couple more hours of driving. For dinner we got some food from Tesco because we have been eating out so much. I got some ribs that I made, my mom had a salad and Levi had some small cookable pizzas. 


Friday morning we left our house to travel from Inverness to our next place we would be staying for 2 nights. The place is called Achmore. On the way, we stopped at a castle called Urquhart Castle. It was right on the lake Loch Ness. Urquhart castle is one of the locations where sightings of the Loch Ness monster have been reported. It was a cool little castle, but it was mostly in ruins which was cool since there were no roofs. It was right on the lake so we had a nice and cool time visiting it. 




After we stopped at that castle we continued our car ride to Achmore. It was a very sunny day Friday, probably around 85 degrees. We drove a lot and on the way, we were driving by some water and came upon a really nice spot to stop. It was a small rocky beach and we could drive our car all the way down to the water. I was going to swim, but it was cold and I wanted a place where I could just jump into the water and get right out again. 




We continued on, and eventually we got to our house in Achmore. The town was super small, and had about 10 houses in total I would say. The small town was hidden away behind the mountains and was very quiet. The house was very nice, and I had a cute little window that had a very nice view of the mountains outside:



It was not that late so we went out again and drove a bit to this cute little town called Plockton. It was right on Loch Carron and was very small and cute. It was to early to eat dinner so we parked our car and went for a walk out on the rocks. We walked around on the rocks and saw the amazing mountain view over the lake in front of us. It was very pretty and sunny. 




The next place that we drove to was the Kyle of Lochalsh. There was a restaurant there that we wanted to eat dinner at, it was actually in a train station. It took us a while to find the restaurant but we found it, we parked by the side of the train station and it was right on the edge of the water. Since we went in at around 5:30 PM, which is when it opened, we were able to get seats without reservations. About 30 minutes later, everybody who was coming in without reservations was getting turned away.



 Their menu was on the wall, and to start I got a seafish chowder, then Levi and I shared some chicken for our main.



The seafish chowder was good, but I don't like fish a lot. Levi got a basil tomato soup to begin, that was very good.



The dessert that we got was an apple crumble, then a traditional scottish dessert that we have never tried before. It was called Cranachan, which traditionally was made from a mixture of whipped cream, whisky, honey and fresh raspberries, with toasted oatmeal soaked overnight in a little bit of whisky. It was pretty good, I wish that it had more flavor in the middle. It had a whipped cream type texture. 



We finished dinner around 7:30 PM. In scotland we have noticed that the daylight here lasts until about 9 or even 10 PM. We still had a bit left so we decided to go check out a castle nearby, which was named Eilean Donan Castle. The castle was on its own little island that we got to by crossing a bridge. We could not get inside, but we were able to walk around it. 



Saturday morning was a huge traveling day, we drove all around the Isle of Skye. The Isle of Skye is an island off of the northwest coast of Scotland. It has a lot of rugged landscapes, mountains and picturesque things to visit. There are only about 10,000 people living on the Isle of Skye which is surprising because it is a massive island. Here is a map of it (the red thing shows the Isle of Skye):



 First, we went to Dunvegan Castle which took about 90 minutes to drive to from our house in Achmore. It is located on the far west side of the Isle of Skye. We walked through some gardens to get to it. It is a pretty mighty looking castle, and inside there was a little game that they had Levi and I play where we had to see how many keys we could find hidden all around the castle. If we found all of the keys we would get a prize. While we explored the inside of the castle we looked for keys in each room. Some of the keys were really well hidden. The castle was beautiful though, and had amazing rooms. We ended up with 14 keys out of 16 so Levi got a puzzle and a bouncy ball. 

 

We left the castle and gardens and drove about 30 more minutes until we got to Neist Point. It is a viewpoint on the westernmost point of the Isle of Skye. There is also a lighthouse there which has been there since 1909. I would not call this a viewpoint, even though it is, because it is much more than a viewpoint. You park at a parking lot, then you can walk down a steep hill to walk along the small peninsula that shows the sea and mountains around. You can then also walk to the lighthouse which is at the very edge of the peninsula and also climb to the top of a cliff mountain thing. Here are some pictures to help describe it:

This is the large hill mountain thing that I was talking about earlier

We spent probably about 2 hours there. It was crazy fun, we walked down from the parking lot and along the cliffs and then Levi and I climbed up that giant mountain with the cliff at the end of it. It was very high and windy at the top but it had gorgeous views. We went to the lighthouse next, we couldn't get into it but we went around it. Right next to the lighthouse was a large rocky area that Levi and I ran on. There were a ton of places to jump into the water from the rocks. We were finished running around and started to walk back to the car, but I still wanted to go see this mini crane thing that I saw on the walk down. My Mom and Levi took the normal path but I ran across the field to get to this cool rusty old crane thing. I was able to climb to the top of it actually, because there was a ladder on the side of it. After I was finished checking it out, I ran back to meet up with them on the path. It was a lot harder to walk up the path back to the parking lot, it was very steep. We were all so tired from doing all of that climbing and walking, but it was definitely worth it. 

We were in the process of driving around the whole edge of the Isle of Skye. Our next stop was Quiraing, which is a viewing point that looks over high cliffs and hidden plateaus of rocks. It was in the middle of the Isle of Skye. This was the view:

We didn't stay long up there, there wasn't much to do other than see the amazing views. We drove down back to the main road around the Island and stopped at the Kilt Rock viewing point. This rock supposedly looks like it has a kilt on. There also is a small waterfall visible from the viewing point. 




The final big place that we stopped at on the Isle of Skye was The Storr. The Storr is a large rocky hill that includes a special piece of rock sticking up from the ground. The story is that an ancient landslide happened and left a large pinnacle of rock sticking up from the mountain that can be seen from far away. This is what it looks like:



At first when we got to this place, we weren't even sure that we were at the right place. We went to the bottom of the hill and read that we were at the right place. The path led us up the side of the mountain. We asked some people on the way how long it was to get to The Storr. Some said 30 minutes, others said 1 hour. About 20 minutes up, Levi and my Mom waited while I ventured to try to climb all the way to the top. We were very under-informed about this climb, It took me a solid 30 more minutes to get to the main viewing point. It was steep hill climbing that wasn't easy. I had some amazing views though:



The main viewing point was not The Storr, so I tried to actually climb up to The Storr after I was finished viewing. Getting up there was hard because it looked like other people had tried to do the same thing, and there were rocks on the side of the mountain that looked like a mini landslide was frozen in place. I got right up to the base of the upwards protruding rock and it was really amazing. Since my Mom and Levi were waiting down near the bottom part of the hill I wanted to get back so they didn't have to wait a long time. I tried to get down as fast as I could. I met them and they were just chilling. My Mom found a cool cairn built. 



We went back down to our car and we still had about 1 hour more to drive to get back to Achmore.

Sunday morning we were leaving our house in Achmore. I got up and had a shower and had some eggs for breakfast. We were all packed up and on the road at around 10 AM. Our next place that we were going to stay was actually a hotel, not an Air B&B like we had been doing for all of our previous nights. In the morning though, we drove back onto the Isle of Skye to visit the Fairy Pools. The Fairy Pools is a series of rivers that includes multiple waterfalls and cold areas to swim in. It is basically a really interesting river that flows down this mountain and has amazing waterfalls along the way and I was able to swim there also. 

When we got there, we had to park on the side of this road that was going down a hill. We then took a path that led us to the Fairy Pools. We walked up as far as we could, then on the walk down is when I got into the water and swam a lot. There were some places where I was able to jump off of some rocks into the pools, it was a lot of fun. 



We spent probably more than 1 hour walking back on the path / on the river since I was in the water. The water was not too cold, but after being in the water for more and more time, I got colder. Eventually we got back to the beginning and I got out and dried off. We walked back to our car and now we were going to be driving towards Kinlochleven. It is a small village and was where we would be staying next. After about 2 hours, we arrived in Fort William which was a town about 30 minutes away from Kinlochleven. We wanted to see the place where they filmed the harry potter train in the first movie going to Hogwarts, but it turned out we had passed it and we would have had to go back to see it. We just continued on to our next hotel. The drive was very pretty, from Fort William to Kinlochleven we were driving along Loch Leven which is a freshwater lake. The village we stayed in was located right at the end of the lake. Our hotel was pretty nice, and once we got there Levi and I went for a short walk. 

We walked back a bit along the road that we had driven on to get here, and since it is all on the water we had no problem finding a spot for me to swim. I actually just jumped in the lake once. It was very cold but it was very pretty. We walked back and past our hotel towards into the small town and we found a shop and got some shortbread and chips and milk. I wanted a lot of shortbread to bring back to Dublin because its delicious and it is a famous Scotland thing.

I had dinner at the restaurant located in our little B&B. It was about 9:20 PM, and they had closed at 9 PM but they still said they could make me a chicken curry thing with mashed potatoes. It was very delicious. We sat outside and were able to see the mountains around us and Loch Leven since we were right at the end of it. 



Monday morning we woke up early. We all got up around 7:30 AM. I took a shower that morning and we packed our stuff. We wanted to get up early since we had a bit of a trip ahead of us because we were traveling to Glasgow. From Kinlochleven to Glasgow it is about a 2 hour drive, but on the way there were 3 things that we really wanted to see. We also had to be in Glasgow by 3 PM since we had a visit planned at 3 PM for the University of Glasgow. 

Our hotel night included a free breakfast so Levi and I went to get some breakfast while my mom took a shower. Levi wasn't hungry, but I got a large breakfast with sausage, eggs, beans, bacon and black pudding. I had Levi eat some of my food so he had some food in him. We got in our car and started our trip. Our trip looked like this:



About half way through that trip if you can see on the map, there is a large green area that is the Loch Lomond and National Park. The first place we stopped was at a waterfall called the falls of falloch. It is just a beautiful waterfall that falls into a little place to swim. I was able to jump off the top of the waterfall into the water, that was very fun.




That was a short but fun stop, the next place we wanted to check out was a place called Inveruglas. It was a small village right on Loch Lomond, but we just drove by it because there was not much to do. The place we really enjoyed though was a village called Luss. It was a small and cute village also on Loch Lomond. The village had really cute houses with tons of flowers, a pier that we walked out on to, and a cool small church with a cemetery. 

Me on the pier in Luss

We also ate Lunch at a place there called 'The Village Rest'. It was the highest rated restaurant in Luss, but there were only like 5 restaurants there in total. The food was good, I got an enchilada, Levi got a chicken burger and my mom got some chili. 



That was our final stop, then we had about a 45 minute drive to Glasgow. We got to our Air B&B in Glasgow around 2 PM. It was actually an old church, and it looked amazing inside. We had a Glasgow University tour at 3 PM so we left at around 2:30 PM to get there. It was a 15 minute drive, and we had no trouble finding parking. We got there right on time. The day was beautiful and the sun was shining very bright and it was very hot.



Our student guides name was Pedro and he was from the Canary Islands. He was a very good guide and we got shown all around. The campus was very beautiful, it reminded me a bit of Dublin. It seemed like Glasgow was a walkable city also, and the buildings were old and beautiful. They all looked castle-like. 




Tuesday morning, we drove down into Glasgow to try to get on the Hop On Hop Off bus. It took us about 1 hour to figure out how to park, we spent a long time looking for places to park. Eventually we found a small parking lot and we had to pay 10 Pounds for more than 2 hours of parking there. We then walked to George Square where we could get the bus. We got on the next one and took it the whole route. We were shown all over, we went by some arenas, by Glasgow University again and all around. 

The whole trip took about 90 minutes. We returned to George Square and got off. We went to a nearby bar called The Piper. We had lunch there, I got a chicken burger and fries. My chicken burger was very good. My Mom got 3 mini different burgers and Levi just got a cheeseburger. 



After that we continued to walk more around Glasgow. 



We ended up at this cemetery called The Necropolis. It is a victorian era cemetery containing the graves & mausoleums of prominent Glaswegians of the day. It was a large cemetery, and when we were there it was probably 90 fahrenheit. 

 

We also walked down a major street in Glasgow called Argyle street. Its one of the main streets with a ton of shops and restaurants on the street. 



Around 5:30 PM, we went back to our car and we had to drive from Glasgow to Edinburgh because we were flying out of Edinburgh. We got there around 6:30 PM, and we returned our car near the airport. We found our flight, but we had a lot of time before it took off so we went shopping in some of the airport stores. I got a magnet for my English teacher in Ireland, Mr. Reidy even though I wont be able to give it to him. I also got two flags, one was the flag of Scotland and the other was the Royal Banner of Scotland. They look like this:

Scottish flag

Royal Banner of Scotland

Our flight only took about an hour. We got into Dublin around Midnight and took a taxi home. The taxi line was long but luckily it went quick enough. I had to pack that night because the next day I was flying back to Michigan. I packed a carry on and a checked bag. I went to sleep around 2 AM, and got up at 6 AM. My flight was at 9:55 AM. It was nice because this time I had only 2 flights, Dublin to Chicago, then Chicago to Grand Rapids. 

June 26 - July 4, 2018