First Weekend Trip: Inverness and Loch Ness!

After a childhood spent visiting the train museum in Duluth, playing with my brothers Brio trains, and reading period books that often involved trains, I finally got to go on one! (Hour lunch trains in Taylor's Falls don't count). As expected, it was not the romantic red plush coach car that one dreams of but instead resembled was the inside of a coach bus. We traveled after dark, so unfortunately it was a blind journey, but a journey nonetheless. I went with four other girls: three from St. Olaf and one from Norway.
Inverness was eerie at 9pm on a Friday night; small sets of 30-somethings dressed under their age quickly ran from cab to club and a handful of smokers gathered outside of pubs, but other than that it was quiet. After walking around in circles, finding food and drinks, we wound up catching the tail end of live folk music at a place called Hootenannys. If I didn't think I had yet experienced the kind of Scottish atmosphere I was looking for, I did then. Wines and ales glowed in warm yellow candlelight and feet tapped to the sounds of fiddle and acoustic guitar. Unfortunately, we missed most of it and had to retire to a fitful night of cold breezes and drunken fights courtesy of our vocal neighbors at the Highlander Hostel.
We set out the next morning to take a tour of Loch Ness. While the fabled monster remained elusive the loch lived up to it's fame: 23 miles long, 754 feet deep, filling 263,000 million cubic feet, it is the largest volume of fresh water in Great Britain. The cold air, snow-covered mountain peaks, and remoteness of the area were all anyone would need to imagine mysterious creatures lurking beneath the murky waters. Climbing around the remains of the Castle Urqhart it was hard to believe the stones had been in place for 800-some years. The site has traceable evidence of being inhabited thousands of years ago, but the castle was likely built around the 1200s. The government was ordered to beseige the castle in order to prevent it from becoming a Jacobite stronghold and a final attack in 1692 left the ruins that stand today.
Inverness was a much friendlier town by day, and we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering from shop to shop and searching for the site of Macbeth's castle (no longer in existence) before catching a train home in the dark.
I would have liked to stay another night and listen to the folk band again, but most everyone wanted to get home to Aberdeen. At least this was a good introduction on how to travel for next time . . .