UK Day 3-1 Reasons of visiting Highland again

  The first time I visited UK was in 1995. It was the first summer vacation of studying in the United States. To save money, I didn’t plan to fly back to Taiwan. When Chris, my best friend in US, invited me to visit his friend who studied in the UK at that time. I immediately accepted.  After all, it was a rare opportunity for me to visit another country. Since I was born, the United States was the first country that I visited. I was glad to have the opportunity to visit the second country. The other advantages included four hours flying time between US and UK, cheap flight ticket, and most importantly, I did not need to worry about the itinerary because Chris took care of it.

At that time, five of us took the train to Edinburgh. We rented a car to visit Highland. The driver was one of our friends who was working in UK with driving experiences there. On the way to the Highlands, when I was sitting in the car and looked outside the window, I saw endless green meadows along the way, interspersed with the flock from time to time. I felt relaxed with joy. I wished I would have digital cameras to shoot down all the scenery.

When we decided to go to Britain in 2011, the first place I want to visit is Highlands. However, I cannot recall any spot to visit as the last trip was arranged by friends. The only thing I know is that renting a car seems to be the easiest way to travel around Highlands.

After deciding to rent a car in Highland, we need to find a city with car rental available. It seems that we can only rent a car in Edinburgh or Inverness because we need to return car at different city. My memories for Edinburgh in 1995 were that it was a industrial city with many dark buildings, famous Scottish pipe and kilts, and I hardly understand their English. My friend told me that Scottish have different accents and need to take some time to adapt.

This time we decided to rent a car in another city, Inverness. To let our journey become relax, we decide to reduce the frequency of packing, relocation, and unpacking. we decide to stay in Inverness for two days.

However, we didn’t have any idea for where to go. The top two places suggested by TripAdvisors wer Inverness Castle and the battlefield. After searching the related photos form internet. None of them could draw my interests. After further searching for more relevant blogs, we found two famous attractions - Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle.

At the beginning,I planned to skip Loch Ness as I was not interested in the Monster of Loch Ness. However, there were few attractions drawing my  interests in inverness.  I used Google Maps to check the scenery along the way. It seems to be a green country road.  Therefore, I still decided to visit Loch Ness.  I also select Urquhart castle at a backup place to visit in case we have more time.




First Edition 2011-08-13

Next: The third day-2 the first experiences of driving in the UK