Still In Scotland

We’re still in lovely Scotland, but finally have a reliable enough internet connection to attempt a blog post. We’ve been having a fabulous time, and I thought I’d give a little update.

Where to even start with the photos? We have hundreds of photos already between our two cameras, and I haven’t even started sorting through mine. First, where have we been, and more importantly, has there been any wool?

We started the trip by flying into London. Heathrow is a madhouse, not helped by the fact that they had high winds and had cut the number of planes that could land by almost half the usual number. It was a bit of a rocky start, but we finally made it to our first destination, Manchester. We have friends there that we met on a cruise a number of years ago. They have been to see us a couple of times, but this was our first visit to their home. They were quite gracious, as we expected, and showed us around Manchester city one day, and around the countryside our second day.

Here’s one Manchester photo that I culled out of the herd of photos.

After our brief stay there, we took the train to Edinburgh, giving me a little down time to knit. I have finally finished that Electric Blue Baby Thing, though I still have some ends to weave in, so I guess technically it’s not finished. I won’t show a photo until it gets home to its final destination, but I’m glad it’s done done done. Now I can knit something else for a change!

Anyway, back to Edinburgh. Here’s a photo from our first evening there.

That gives you a little bit of an idea of what we liked best about Edinburgh. It’s undoubtedly a lovely city, but we decided to spend only 2 nights and 1 full day there, so didn’t have time to see anything but the most touristy sites. After all, how can you go to Edinburgh without seeing the Castle, Holyroodhouse Palace, or walking the Royal Mile? The latter was mostly a long string of what I fondly call rubber-tomahawk shops, and at the Castle, they wouldn’t even let me try on the Scottish Crown. Oh well.

Given that we were far more interested in the vast Scottish countryside than its biggest cities, we rented a car and headed north to Nairn, on the coast of the Moray Firth east of Inverness. This is a lovely little seaside resort, and we stayed at a wonderful small guesthouse right in town. There was a yarn shop in town, though I didn’t get there since it opens quite late in the morning and we headed out early to be tourists before that. Here are a few photos.

That’s Cawdor Castle, still a private residence for the Dowager Countess Cawdor, though she kindly clears out in the summer so tourists can see the place.

The castle grounds has a wool shop, with some wooly things for sale, but no yarn. I struck up a conversation with the woman behind the desk, who is a life long knitter, though she had just purchased her first sock yarn to try socks. One thing led to another, I gave her a link to my blog since she needed a sock pattern, and John surreptitiously snapped a photo.

You meet the nicest knitters while traveling!

Last but not least, I’ll leave you with a sunset photo that John snapped on the beach at Nairn.

Pretty, eh? I’d show more photos, but this is a very slow internet connection. I’ll get to the rest of the shots at some point, and John will put them all together in one big photo show when we get home.

We’re now on the Isle of Skye, and we’re here for one more night, then head to the Glencoe area, then Glasgow, then home. I finally found wool yesterday and today, I’ll show photos of that next time! I’m off to drink whisky!

Author: Lorette

My name is Lorette. I learned to knit in 1999, and took up spinning in 2009. I'm a physician specializing in internal medicine, and live in the Pacific Northwest. Enjoy my blog! View all posts by Lorette