Europe

A DAY IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

As promised I’m finally getting our Scotland trip up on the blog.  I’ve talked about everything else about our Europe summer vacation but what many of you probably don’t know is it all started with Scotland.

We’ve traveled to France, England, and Ireland, but Scotland has always been on my list.  Our anniversary is in August, not a good month for living in Texas, so every summer we’re always talking about places to visit to get a break from the heat.  So in honor of our 19th anniversary we picked Scotland!

It started out as a simple 8 day trip, we bought the airfare and that was that for months.  Then we were invited to a music festival in Milan in early July that we really wanted to go to.  We ended up moving our original airfare departure date nearly 5 weeks, we paid a change fee but it was a lot cheaper than 2 people flying round trip twice over the summer.  And so our 6 week European vacation was born.

While visiting Scotland we stayed in Edinburgh, and the next and last Europe blog post will be some highlights while staying in the city.  A while back I did blog post about our experience at Inveraray Castle so if you’re curious be sure and read up on that.  The castle is in my husband’s family, although according to our DNA tests I’m more Scottish than him, so where’s my castle?

I had so many photos from Scotland so I’ve decided to split this into 2 sections, first the Scottish Highlands and then I’ll talk about our experience in Edinburgh, and that will officially be the end of my talking about Europe for 2018!

For convenience we took a Viator tour out to the highlands.  Ideally you’d want to spend a lot more than a day here… it’s beyond gorgeous.  I think the next time we visit Scotland we’ll stay just in the Highlands, hike, relax, and just explore the area more.  When we travel to new places we almost always want to go back and visit the little places, places that we had just gotten a glimpse of and places that we’d never even heard of, like Vezelay in France for example.

The drive through the Highlands is absolutely gorgeous, we stopped at lots of scenic places, and after lunch we took a boat ride on the Loch Ness.  I’m sure you’ve heard of the Loch Ness Monster, or Nessie as she’s known as in the area, anyone who can catch a photo is looking at lots of money and publicity… but sadly she didn’t surface.

This glacier formed lake goes as deep as 745 feet, so there’s definitely room to swim around and hide!  The water is a very dark brown due to high amount of peat that washes down the hills, so that also helps Nessie stay hidden.

The mountainous area is so lush and green, with tiny streams running down them, pink and yellow wildflowers grow everywhere too.  Even though we visited in August during the Europe 2018 heatwave the air was still nice and cool.

The Scottish Highlands were so picturesque and beautiful, whether you go for a day trip or you stay for a week you will thoroughly enjoy the time you spend there.  It was certainly the highlight of our 19th anniversary trip even though I win as being more Scottish than Brian.  The question is where will we go for our 20th?

Laura

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2 thoughts on “A DAY IN THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS

  1. Beautiful photos! My husband and I are headed to the Highlands soon for our anniversary. Did you guys encounter or hear much are bugs/midges in the highlands? I’ve read such conflicting info all over the internet!