Beauty and the Beard:
Bound to Wander

We were ready. Bags packed. House clean. Bedsheets changed. Floors vacuumed. The kind of pre-vacation preparedness that makes you feel like you might finally be becoming real adults. We were on time. But alas, the winds were not in our favor. Quite literally. Storms rolled in from the west right as we were heading to the airport. Somehow, we still made it there in mostly light sprinkles and even managed to get from the parking garage to the terminal without getting rained on. Check-in was easy. Security didn’t even pull Aaron aside for additional screening, which honestly felt suspiciously lucky. That was about where our luck ran out. To preface all of this: our flight to Lisbon had a 65-minute layover in DC. It was already going to be tight. Once we got to the airline lounge, we quickly realized we might be in trouble. The place was packed with stressed-out people staring at their phones, pacing around, and loudly explaining their travel disasters to anyone within earshot. Apparently ...

  We woke up early (for us) and walked 25 minutes to Edinburgh Castle. Unfortunately, the tickets to tour the castle were sold out. Apparently, we were supposed to have booked several days in advance. Who knew? We’ll hit it next time. That was our big plan for the day, so we had to improvise. We made our way down the street to St Giles Cathedral to take some pictures. We’d been in Europe for almost 2 weeks, and still hadn’t gone into any big old cathedrals. We picked a good one. We stopped in a small shop for some coffee and pastries. There was a book exchange with a strange looking book called Bored of the Rings . It’s a Lord of the Rings parody. They let us take it because Kaylea couldn’t get through reading the summary without laughing. After that, we went into a few shops to look for some souvenirs. We weren’t looking too hard. There just really wasn’t a lot more to do than shop since our plans had been thrown off. It was around this time that Aaron realized that we hadn’t rec...

We woke up and had a nice breakfast before heading out to see Inverness. There wasn’t a whole lot to see in the city center besides some shopping, so we mostly just wandered around looking at the old buildings. We took a stroll next to the river and stopped to read the monuments along the way. There are A LOT of monuments all over the country. Many of them are monuments to foreigners who assisted Scotland in some way, but most seem to pay tribute to military heroes. After about an hour of exploring, we headed back to the car to be on our way.  Our first stop for the day was a museum at the battlefield of Culloden, which was only a few minutes from the city center. We spent a few hours reading about the history through a timeline-of-events exhibit before walking around the actual battlefield. Once again, we were faced with the fact that we really don’t know a lot about Scottish history, but it was still a fascinating exhibit.  After Culloden, we had to drive to Edinburgh. Final...

On a lot of these roads, there is no speed limit. It seems like people take that to mean, drive as fast as you can. Nobody seems to mind that there are no lines on the road, or the road is made of dirt, or you can barely fit one car on the road. There are plenty of signs saying “Blind Turns”, or “Slow”, or Aaron’s favorite “Oncoming vehicles in middle of road.” There might as well just be a bunch of signs saying “Fingers Crossed”. Well after another butt clenching drive, we made it to the Fairy Pools of Skye Island. It was probably our favorite hike so far. It had crystal clear ponds and waterfalls, and tons of rocks to climb on. There were plenty of people swimming in the pools, unfortunately, we didn’t have our swimsuits handy. But we climbed around. We took it all in. Eventually, we made our way out. On the way to our next stop was yet another castle. Eilean Donan Castle was a castle from the 13th century that had been destroyed, then rebuilt in the 1930’s as...

We finally got a day to sleep in and this was our nicest hotel room yet. It had by far the most comfortable bed. We ate a late breakfast and, by the time we started getting ready to leave the room, it was about time to start thinking about what to do for lunch. However, we had some hiking to do. The Old Man of Storr is a huge rock on top of a hill on the northern part of the Isle of Skye. It was only about a terrifying 15 minute drive from our hotel. The hike was easy, but long. The view was amazing. Getting up to the old man wasn’t too bad. Getting back down was a bit of a scramble. It was steep, and there was a lot of loose rock. We were there for 2 or 3 hours before we decided to hunt for some cliff sides. After another 15 minutes of less horrible, but still stressful, driving we made it to Lealt falls. We noticed a lot of the water is brown here compared to Iceland or Canada. We assumed it’s because it’s less glacial water, and more groundwater and rainfall. Kilt Rock & Mealt c...

Wednesday we woke up VERY early only to realize that we had mapped to the wrong Mallaig and only needed 1.5 hours to travel northwest, not 2.5 southeast. We dragged a bit but still hit the road by 9:45.  There weren’t too many stops on the way, but we did pull into the carpark at the Glenfinnan Viaduct. That’s the famous bridge from the Harry Potter movies. You know, the one that Harry takes to Hogwarts. C’mon guys, know your nerd trivia. Anyways, it cost money to park, it was raining, and we had a ferry to catch so we did not hike up to it. It looked neat though.  We made it to the ferry a little early and caught the 12:00 on standby. The harbor crossing looked a lot like the harbor in Husavik. It was a pleasant crossing with nice views, except every time you looked in the center and saw the giant tour bus tilting back and forth, you’d want to throw up. Once back in the car, it was an hour drive up to Portree in the northern part of the Isle. We had some lunch at a small cafe...