Back to Lochinver and leaving Beauly

Fortunately I still manage to find unmarked roads in this area and on one of them we pass a house where deer are grazing at the door. Other years we usually encounter deer regularly but this year it is the first (and last) time. Well worth taking a picture.
After 2 hours we arrive in Lochinver and we immediately get the dongle handed to us although they can not tell us where and when it was found. Our fear is that it laid some time in the rain outside and maybe doesn't work anymore. After charging the battery in the car, however, it still seems to be working fine. We are quite happy with that!

We are now a bit earlier than yesterday and we drive a lot further north, there are more places where we were not before, all side roads and a lot of them dead ends. The coast is very irregular and sometimes it is unclear what is the sea and what a loch or a lake. We are now in the most northwestern corner of Scotland. Only at the extreme point at Cape Wrath I see a road on the map that I can not drive myself: for this you have to take a boat from Keodale to the other side of the Kyle of Durness from where you can go to Cape Wrath with a van.

At Oldmoreshore, no more than a collection of widewly spread houses and a caravan park, we see a beautiful beach where we would like to go on a warm summer day, but it is now a mere 8 degrees and it seems to start raining every moment. In this part of Scotland there are a number of beautiful and long beaches anyway, but you never see anyone bathe which is not so strange with this weather. Our next bath will probably in Greece again.
In the village we see a beautiful direction indicator to where we want to go: here, there and everywhere. That is a sign we like!

It is now almost a 3 hours drive back to Beauly and we do that via the A838. It is called an A-road which sounds like a big road but part of it is a single track road, a one-lane road with passing places, 55 kilometers long. However, we do not encounter 1 car on the whole piece and nake a good speed so that we are in Beauly before 8 o'clock where they have waited for us with the food, they assumed that we would be late.

The next day, Sunday, I first restore the wifi in the building, one of the devices had reset and now gave conflicts. So, with that resolved again, we can go for a last short trip in the area, I have discovered some places nearby that we do not know yet, villages like Moy where we see a nice gatelodge.

And on the other side of the A9, east of Loch Ness (which we have not seen this year) are some small hamlets and especially narrow roads that I still have to mark on the map. Tourists rarely visit this area, actually the east of Loch Ness up to the A9 which runs from Inverness to Perth, although it is beautiful to drive through. We will certainly do that again sometime in the future.
By the time Iain is expected back we are also back in Beauly to say goodbye to everyone.

When Iain comes back he has the bagpipe player, he arranged for the funeral, with him, the young Iain MacGillivray that he will later bring to his home at Tain. Since last year he is also the youngest commander of the MacGillivray clan. We stick for another hour and then it is really time to leave. Wait just 5 more minutes, Iain asks us, and then it turns out that they have arranged a very special goodbye for us: they have asked Iain to play the bagpipes when we are leaving. How incredible, we have never experienced this before, really very special and we thank him very much. Rachel and John, our English friends, are even a bit jealous ...
Next year we hope to see them all again.