Day 16 - Loch Ness & Drumnadrochit

May 17, 2008

We woke up, got ready, and went to the Little Chef next door for breakfast. This was our first time eating at a Little Chef (they seemed to be equivalent to our Denny's as they are everywhere along the freeways).

I ordered an American Breakfast which came with scrambeled egges, bacon, and pancakes. Jeremiah ordered a side of pancakes. Now, keep in mind, we were thinking our food would be similar to what you would get in America since they called it an American breakfast. Well, we were right in two aspects - you got American bacon, although we would have preferred English bacon, and we got scrambeled eggs, which I think would be pretty hard to mess up but I think I did see the cook make them in the microwave instead of on the stove. But with regards to the pancakes, we were way off.

You got three with the breakfast and 3 if you ordered a side. But they were literally half the size of a CD and very thin. We were expecting fluffy, thick buttermild pancakes that would fill us up but that was far from what we got. They were tiny and they were still cold!

Now, I'm not sure how you could have cold pancakes when they are supposed to be cooked on a griddle unless they were frozen and then heated up but not completely, which is exactly what we think they did.

Needlesstosay, we did not enjoy this breakfast very much and could not believe how much money we had to spend on it. We went up to the cash register to pay and after we left the restaurant, I realized that we didn't leave a tip on the table. Well, they didn't really serve us that great and the food really wasn't that good, so we quickly forgot that oversight.

We got our things packed and put them in the car. Then we headed back in to Edinburgh. We weren't sure exactly how to get back to the parking place we had found the previous night but we tried. We were quicly running out of time and didn't know how to get there. So we found a place on the side of the road and parked the car behind another car. There weren't any meters to put in money so we thought it must be for free in that area, plus it was a Saturday and many metered places are free on the weekends.

As we walked away from the car, I prayed that God would protect it and that nothing bad would happen while we were gone for the next hour. We found Mary King's Close once again and waited for a minute inside before the tour began. Then they opened a door for us all to go through and listen to our guide.

He then took us down the stairs to go below the building and enter the Close. Honestly, as we went on this tour it was very hard for me to imagine what this street was like when there weren't any buildings on top of it. I just couldn't get my bearings. The street was named this as Mary King was a prosperous person and lived at the very top of the street and rented out the houses along the street to tenants. The street was very steeply sloped and her house really was at the top of it as all the others houses went down the slope.

Apparently, back in those days, everyone would just throw out their garabage and bathroom waste on the street as the steep slop would carry it down to the bottom where it would sit and fester (no one there were so many diseases).

I couldnt' comprehend how sloped this street was and exactly how it looked until the very end of the tour when we were actually standing in the middle of the street and looking back up towads the top. Then I got the picture.

Throughout the tour, they took us to different buildings that used to house different people and our guide told us stories about those people. They added in props and mannequins to the different rooms to help tell the stories and to give you an idea of what it all looked like.

The top stories of the buildings on this street were demolished and the lower ones remained as they city built a new building on top of the old ones. They figured the lower parts would help to keep the new building level and would help even out the sloping ground before. That's why they are still there.

The tour was interesting but it was not at all what we were expecting. I think we were both expecting to see more of the "underground city" but instead you were just taken into a few rooms and down Mary King's Close and another close next to hers. I'm not sure I recommend going on this tour. Maybe if you don't have anything else you would rather be doing.

When the tour finished, we left and walked back to our car; it was now 11am. I was starting to get a little worried about the car and as we got close to it, there was a police officer looking at it. He was getting out his pad of paper. I went right up to him and asked if we weren't allowed to park there. He said we weren't and I said we were sorry we didn't know. He then said not to worry about it as we were now there to take care of it (Whew! No ticket.).

I asked him a few questions on where we were allowed to park and he let me know that when there is a single yellow line, you are allowed to park there for only 5 minutes and a double yellow means no parking. I asked if this was true for all the UK and he said yes. This answer was odd to me but I didn't say anything of it to him. All over the UK we have seen countless numbers of drivers park on the single yellow line so we thought that must be okay - and they didn't appear to only be there for 5 minutes. We knew that double yellow meant no parking. Well, we were just thankful we had arrived in time before he wrote a ticket.

Looking back on it, I think he may have thought that we had just parked there not that long ago (although it really had already been an hour) and saw that he was looking at the car so we came back to ask him about it. Whatever the case, I'm just glad our prayers were answered and the car was safe.

We got in the car and headed off for our long drive up to Loch Ness. First we headed to Glasgow just so we could see it as we drove through. I tried to take a few pictures from the car. Then we went North to Loch Lomand.

At Loch Lomand, which was very beautiful, we stopped and got out of the car at the only parking area we could find, but there wasn't really a good place to walk down to the water so we left after a few minutes and drove the rest of the way along the loch. It was a pretty drive.

Then we headed up through the Highlands to Drumnadrochit. This was a very beautiful drive and we took lots of pictures. I would tell you more about it, but, as usual, I was asleep most the way. One thing of note, though, was we had never seen so much roadkill in our lives during the few hours we were on this road.

You only had to drive 50 yards or so before you saw more roadkill and it was consistently showing up along the whole drive. It was really weird especially because it didn't seem like there were that many cars around to do that much damage and we certainly didn't see that many animals around that could get hit (although, maybe by the time we had gotten there all the animals that were around were already on the road).

About 1 1/2 hours away from the B&B we were getting really hungry so we found a McDonalds and stopped for dinner. I was really craving vegetables, so I ordered a side salad, which of course they were all out of. We got our food and then I saw that they had packets of carrots and packets of apples for the kid's meals. So I went to see if I could buy one of each and I could. They weren't great but at least it was something. We finished up and got back in the car.

We arrived at the B&B and were very excited about this place. It was the only B&B in the small town that was also a working farm with sheep and Highlander Cows. These cows are so cool and we've never seen any like it before; they have really long hair all over their bodies and hair on their head that hangs down and covers their eyes. I loved looking at them.

The owners had just bought a new mother with a calf and they were in the front of the house - a perfect view from the breakfast room. When we arrived, our hostess was showing around another American couple that had also just arrived.

We were shown our room, which was very comfortable, clean, and perfect (even had a four poster bed, which I had never been in one before). We brought in our things and made ourselves at home. We decided to have a night in and just relax the rest of the evening in bed and watch some TV. We watched a show that was competition to see who would be the next "Nancy" in the Oliver Broadway show in the West End. There were 5 girls competing and they each had to perform songs and then get critiqued before the viewers voted at home. I really enjoyed it and Jeremiah put up with it for me.

We had a good night and it was really nice to take it easy.

Love,
S&J