Goodbye, Scotland

And I’m back! Time to recap; let’s see what I can remember…

Monday morning we left Belfast, Edinburgh bound. We drove to the port to board the Ferry for a 3 hour trip to Scotland. I was lucky enough to sleep through most of it in the on-board cinema because it was a bumpy ride with high winds rocking the boat. As much as a I love traveling, the actual transportation aspect is my least favorite by far. Once we got to Scotland we had another 2-3 hour drive until the hotel but we got to see a lot of beautiful country sides and a couple historic sites. Mostly we just slept between stops because there wasn’t much else going on. When we got to Edinburgh we checked in to the hotel where we would spend 2 nights!! Then it was time for our NewEurope tour. This company does tours in 14 major cities across Europe and you can do the free ones or pay for a private tour guide which is what our group does. They also do a variety of specific tours (we went through this company when we were in London as well). The tour guide was pretty awesome, they always try to make it fun for us and they usually succeed. We got to see a lot of the influential places that inspired Harry Potter. I might have to be a Potter nerd now that I’ve seen so many of the sights! After that we hit up some awesome souvenir shops that were right by our hotel before going to dinner at a pub that was recommended to us. And of course Nick talked us into going on the Ghost tour, led by the same company. It wasn’t as scary as I thought it would be but it was fun to hear all of the creepy stories. Edinburgh definitely has a scary history.

Tuesday we had a full day of touring the Highlands. The tour guide wore a kilt and boarded the bus with us while we drove out of Edinburgh. It was cool to just ride the bus instead of walking around and having to carry all of our stuff for the day with us. However, it was very difficult to stay awake most of the morning. We did see some important castles during the trip, stopped at Loch Ness for lunch break and then headed back. We also stopped to see some hairy cows. We heard a lot of good stories from our tour guide, although I can’t remember most of them at the moment. We did the last of our souvenir shopping after the tour, stopped at the Hard Rock Café to see it (4^th one in a week’s time). And then dinner at a pub that came highly recommended from other group members. As luck would have it they had kitchen problems so we had to change plans and ended up with a very late dinner. Packing was a must after that because we had to leave at 5:30 the next morning (aka today).

Wednesday was an early day with an entirely sleepy bus for the first 3 hours. It was so cold on there though I had to switch to the floor to get close to the heater. When we arrived at the port on time we found out the ferry was going to be late and we had to volunteer 6 people to be searched at the gates. So I went and it was very pointless. We then had an hour to sit on the bus before we could board the ferry and branch off into the upper level to relax. We also had internet again so we were all content with computer time. This ride was much smoother. Unfortunately it was a bit behind schedule so we won’t be in Dublin as early as we’d planned to be.

Tomorrow we’ll be flying home to Antwerp for our last night there, it’s already time to pack for home! Let’s hope everything fits into the suitcase as well as I’d planned..