Leisure Trips Part II

The another trip I mentioned in the previous post was this, going to Scotland. The main goal was to hike the highest mountain in the UK, the Ben Nevis. Together with some friends, Rogelio, Ángela and Iulia, we went into this adventure.

We flew into Edinburgh and from them we took a rented car to go to Fort William, the town just at the base of the mountain. The first experience for the drivers, and also for me, was to get used to the right steering wheel, and driving on the left. Everything is symmetric, even getting into a roundabout, or drive slowly in the left, overtake from the right. Just weird... Even our drivers would go to the other side of the car, as a left-sided steering wheel car! Luckily our drivers got used to it after some hours :)

The Scottish outback is just great! It resembled me the Puna grassland, but of course, we never went higher than 400masl.

The D-day was the second day there. It started raining quite hard, but later we sunshine started breaking through the fog and the clouds, and we have a very beautiful date hiking the mountain up. With this pictures you can see how excited and happy we were at the beginning.

Later, our faces were reflecting the tiredness...





We got encouraged to go further when we saw the top of the mountain, an incredible experience, provided that you are very exhausted by then!


On the top, everything was just joy and hungriness :) We had lunch, took all pictures for the record, and went down again.





Of course, the going down wasn't as exciting as the ascent because we were already very tired, but the landscape was there to be just contemplated... as going up we had some foggy conditions.




The figures: we climbed up 1300m approx, that's the height of the mountain, but we start from the sea level, so we climbed all its height. It took us 4:40h to get to the top, and 4h to get to the base back. That day, after a very desired warm dinner, we went to bed at 21:40 (time that we just got to the hostel).

The day #3, we continued our trip, a bit improvised, though. We went all the way north-east to Inverness, driving across the Loch Ness. (Un)fortunately we didn't manage to meet Nessy...


In Inverness, after some beers, we wandered around the city, stretching our soring muscles, specially those in our legs! In the evening, we drove all the south to Edinburgh, talking about very spicy topics ;)




In Edinburgh, we had a hostel just in the coast of the North sea, so we decide to go to the coast, and drink some authentic Scottish whisky! It was so cold that all the whisky we drank served to warm our bodies up. Each of us took a quarter of a bottle on average, and I think that at least I wasn't as drunk as I'd have expected...

The day after, the obliged driving over an English car. So did I over a not so busy road next to our hostel :)

And of course, the tour through the downtown... The main attraction the castle. As you can see, the weather played a very nice role, sunny although it was very cold.





The final day, we just had to back home... having very nice memories of this fantastic trip, the four of us as a group spent a very nice time, enjoy 100% every moment. Thanks all of you guys for thaaat(1)

All or most of the pictures are gently provided by Iulia following this link. Thanks a lot!

(1) Common sight for Scotts: every time they are sorry, they say "sorry for/about that", with the 'that' quite stressed. We even laughed when someone was sorry... just funny :)