Travel day - now in Inverness

This was a bit nuts, our travel time to Inverness from the airport in Regina was just short of 24 hours. Now I remember why, after our trip last year, I said we would stay the first night in the city we land in, of course we didn’t. We are bagged but have since revived ourselves for a time with some North Sea scampi and a pint of Deuchars APA.

Our flights were very good and the waits in airports were only a few hours on each leg. No screaming babies, just the occasional yelp from a kid somewhere in the back of the plane to London. When we got to Edinburgh we took the Airport Link bus downtown. We could barely understand the stop announcements of the driver and some confusion arose when some guy asked us if the stop was Waverley Bridge, of course we were uncertain, so the guy asked the driver and I think the driver misunderstood the guy and said yes, so he got off and John was thinking we should get off but it sure didn’t look like downtown to me, so we stayed on and Waverley Bridge was the last stop.

The first thing we heard when we got off the bus in Edinburgh, was a piper playing ‘Amazing Grace.’ We walked past him on the other side of the street on our way to Carphone Warehouse, a couple of young girls were taking his pic and throwing coins into his pipe case, a man in a kilt, drives women of all ages completely mad. Good thing we got the cell phone since I neglected to book any accommodation in Inverness and it came in handy when we got off the train here.

The train from Edinburgh to Inverness was a bit more Spartan than I expected, with damn hard seats and not much in the way of leg room. It was pretty full and there was some issue with them having to switch cars so no seat reservations were valid. It took until a couple of minutes before the train departed for them to post the platform so we wondered how the hell we were supposed to make it to the right platform, the info people assured us neophytes that there would be time and sure enough they posted the platform and a mob moved forward, at this point a train worker glanced at our tickets as we all rushed by, rather than everyone putting their tickets in the gate control - thus everyone, as predicted, made it on the train to Inverness.

The train stops many times along the line, the country side is very green and very beautiful and sparsely populated. The scenery is very similar to the west coast (BC), except for the big mountains of course, but there is a mix of pine and the leaves of the deciduous trees just turning to fall colours - we noticed that the “fall season” advanced as we progressed north.

Tomorrow we will spend some time around Inverness then drive a bit north to Tain to overnight there before heading to the ferry to Orkney the next day. As we expected, the Scottish people are very friendly and helpful - their accent is the best.