After our scouting mission the previous day, GMac and I thought that it might be cool to take the rest of the fam to Plockton and do some more exploring. Unfortunately, today was the day we had to say goodbye to GMac and The Twin as they had to get back to the desert. Wife, Father Law, and myself would stay for another few days.
Before I go on with what happened today, I want to make sure I write about a few things so that I don’t forget. First off, dogs are allowed basically everywhere here, and just about every dog is VERY well-behaved. I’ve learned to absolutely hate the White Millennial Dog Owner demographic over the last few years (ask me if you want a rant), but everyone here actually trains their dogs. Good dogs. Second, Stuart, the local who told us about the otters, also mentioned that Scotland has a venomous snake, the European Adder. We weren’t sure if this was correct, but we finally looked it up, and hot damn, this adder can be found in Scotland and even across Scandinavia. Fun Fact. Apparently they are super rare, though, with Stuart only seeing them a small handful of times throughout his life and a local (fly) fisherman reported he had only seen one.
Anyway, back to Plockton! GMac and I started the day with a little run, then we all drove the few miles down to Plockton.
Garmin of run:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12180767873
In Plockton, we finally found our first “real” souvenir shop here. Many of the previous shops we had been to were cool, but when you sort of see a lot of the same things, you realize that you’re in a more “castle” souvenir shop. Some of those things are still cool, but we found some actual gifts at this place. I also bought some tick repellant. It was really dumb to get some ticks on that mountain bike ride a few days ago, but I guess I’d rather have a few ticks than whatever these “midges” actually are. They sound like total nightmares, so probably don’t come here in the Summer.
Here are some more photos of Plockton. Remember them boats from yesterday? They float now.
We still had a little time to kill before dropping GMac and The Twin off at the train station, so we quickly checked out this nearby Duncraig castle. This castle is all private, but I guess you can still drive right on up to it? We did, anyway. Here’s what that looked like:
The highlight of this castle was they had little robot Roombas mowing the lawn. Here’s a video of that nonsense:
After that little castle jaunt, we headed out to the train station, and GMac and the Twin flagged down their train. It’s pretty cool that they have that kind of infrastructure out here in these remote Highlands.
With the rest of the afternoon ahead of us, the 3 of us, Wife, Father Law, and myself, went and checked out this pretty fun coral beach. Here’s where we were:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12184438565
Unfortunately, it was on this day that the weather really started taking a turn for the worst. Rain was forecasted all day for every day we had been in Scotland, but it was finally actually starting to rain. That didn’t stop us from taking some cool photos on coral beach, though!
After the coral beach, we decided to check out another nearby castle, the Eilean Donan castle. This castle is much more famous, and is open to the public, although you have to pay 3 GBP for parking and 3 GBP to walk over the bridge. We did the former by paying with largely 10p coins, but skipped the latter as it was getting late. We did take some nice photos, though:
The weather forecast doesn’t look great tomorrow, but we’ll see what happens! One of the reasons why I’ve been so slow to update the blog is we’ve been treating every day as if it’s the last nice weather day we’ll have all trip, but it only ends up barely raining each day! Fingers crossed!