The weather forecast for every single day so far has been awful. Basically, we are to expect wind and rain all day. However, we keep getting lucky, and the rain is staying away! We ended up making today a BEACH day because we don’t know when the weather is going to actually take a turn for the worst and rain us out.
Before kicking it at the various beaches, we drove northwards to a WW II Memorial at the entrance to Loch Ewe. I guess Loch Ewe used to be an important gathering spot for Allied supply ships to take supplies to Russia via the Northern route above Norway. Maybe people died doing this during harsh arctic conditions, and this memorial was established for them. Here are some photos:
That’s a putting green. There’s golf in Scotland, remember?
And here is the walk we did:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12146042228
It turns out that many of the roads in the Highlands are actually just one lane roads. There are some turn-off spots you can use to pass, but otherwise things are just one lane. So you need to always be paying attention and making sure you don’t smash into someone head on. Also, they don’t really do speed limits here. Like, there are speed limits, but in most cases, you would never want to be close to driving to the speed limit. For example, technically the speed limits on parts of these one lane roads are 60 mph. Yeah no.
Anyway, coming back from the WW II Memorial, we stopped at a few beaches. We all took some pretty fun photos, so I’ve just made a Youtube compilation of them below:
Not a bad day at all! We went at low tide, which means we had a LOT of beach to walk on. I also walked around some rocks that would have been totally under water during high tide, so that was neat. 15ft tidal swings sure are fun! Here’s a garmin of that long beach walk, including the part where I Boomered and forgot to turn off my watch:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12147383695
When we were driving to the beach shown above, we spotted what looked like an eagle. They are bringing back the White-tailed eagles that used to live here, and our whale watching guide from yesterday made it seem like they were quite common. I stopped the car and got a crappy video of it. I can’t tell if it is a white-tailed eagle or a golden eagle, so you decide! At first we thought it was for sure a white-tailed eagle, but some of what I thought was a white tail was actually the eagle’s feet.
We also stopped at a fun book store in Gairloch, where GMac bought be this dope pocket bird guide that we’ve used a bunch already. More on that later. Wife and I dropped the rest of the kids off then went to get some gas down the street. We were having trouble with the machine (turns out it was just effing broken), but there was a random local man there trying to help us. If I forget to write it later, just know that we’ve had nothing but pleasant experiences with the people of the Highlands so far. This is like my 5th trip to Europe, and it has easily been the best in terms of interactions with the locals. I’m sure speaking English helps, but still, these people have all been so nice. 10/10 would recommend, but disclaimer: am white.
After getting back from the beach, GMac and I went on a nice run. We ran around the area of our hotel, and guided the ladies to a spot where a bunch of Pheasants were hanging out. I’ll put some pictures below, but you can see a lot of pheasant action in the video for tomorrow. But here’s the map of the run we did:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12148055604
We finished the day trying to find some otters. We didn’t find any, but we did see a very nice rainbow:
And here’s the happy family:
Oh yeah, and go Birds.