Home -> Europe -> Great Britain -> Travelogue 2005 -> Tuesday 23 August

Between Nairn and Carrbridge, Strath Spey

Today we drive around in the area southeast of Inverness: near Nairn we turn to the south and wander about. We use our map to look for new roads where we haven't been before but in the meantime we forget to take pictures. We see quite a lot of nice thinks worth photographing, but maybe it is because we already have so many pictures of Scotland and are so used to this pretty scenery that we forget it. Another good excuse is that it is very hard (for us, at least), to make good landscape pictures, we should do a course for that. We are only mateurs and don't have the 'photographic eye' yet.

Of course we run into our daily share of nice small houses and castles, like castle Grant to the right. If we had to choose we take the small house since that is easier to keep clean. And the house to the right is just a part of the wall surrounding castle Grant. If we really had the opportunity to choose a house in Scotland we would have a very difficult time, since there are thousands of great houses in phantastic spots! Fortunately, we probably never have to face this difficult choice, unless the national lottery decides to sponsor us.

On the background the Cairngorm Mountains border to this hilly region with many different landscapes like coniferous woods, deciduous woods, heathland which are blossoming now, and bare fields. The wetaher is as alternating as the landscapes: much rain, much sunshine, sometimes warm and sometimes cold. The weather also influences us in taking pictures: when it rains we rather stay in the dry and warm car than go outside making photographs.

Despite the lack of pictures, we are bsuy driving around the whole day and pause only once in Grantown-on-Spey. After that we go further south and finally take the A9 to return to Beauly. All in all, it was a quiet day on which we have made quite some kilometers. We must think of a way to make route maps of the roads we have driven on, that way we can later see where we have been to.

At night, Iain serves us a delicious meal and we are being entertained by an ex-submarine-soldier who has many stories to tell, and a salesmen of streetsweepers who travels between Turkey, the Netherlands and Great Britain. A very lucrative merchandise, he tells us. The discussion becomes more animated when politics are involved and ways to fight against criminality, but we keep it cool. You never know what will happen when such subjects are being disdussed in a Scottish pub!
In the meantime, Cathy tries to persuade us to stay longer in Beauly, with stories about a hurricane, or at least a big storm, coming this way. And we can't leave in such bad weather, can we? But we are unyielding, we came here this time to see England and so we will. Although we would also love to stay here... but that we don't tell this time, it is hard enough to leave this place once again!

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