After a fun few days in Edinburgh, I decided to head to Inverness for a quick search for Nessie and some of the castle ruins in the area.  It is also where I would be catching my plane to Northern Ireland for my next stop on my trip around the UK.  I took the bus to Inverness and arrived in the early afternoon to the same hostel as Evan who i had met in Manchester.  The bus i took was accidently the gold bus which had a attendant who provided refreshments throughout the ride.  It was the cheapest bus I could find last minute and was probably more expensive than the other bus, but it seemed as though the other bus was sold out.

The scenery was pretty pretty on the drive through the highlands.

I met Evan at a bar near Inverness castle and we had a few beers before heading to a Spanish restaurant where we got the tappas of the day.  Not very Scottish, but sometimes you can’t always eat the food from the place you are in.  After some delicious (yet a bit pricey) dinner, we headed back to the hostel where we gathered a small crew together for an evening of chilling, Gear VR demos and pool.

We headed off to check out the nightlife in Inverness and due to the pretty cool crowd we had, no matter where we ended up we had fun!

There was a pretty solid group of  us from mostly North America and Germany.  It was also key that during this evening three of us decided to rent a car the next day and explore a bunch of castle ruins as well as check out Loch Ness!

I awoke early in the morning and jumped on the a bus to the airport to go pick up the car as that was the only rental car place in the area.  This would be my first time driving on the other side of the road, so i was a bit nervous, but confident I could do it with a little bit of concentration.

I picked up the car, picked up my other passengers and were on our way to Loch Ness!

after some photo ops on the Loch and then headed to Urquhart castle which was packed with tourists.  We went to 4 other castle ruins on that day and this one was the most annoying since you had to pay, there were tons of tourists and it was not that impressive.

The ruins were from the 13th to 16th century which at the time i thought were pretty old (but now i am in Egypt and things are over 3000 years old!!! I guess that’s perspective).

It was a bit of a walk to the parking lot but overall we saw and we enjoyed but were eager to continue our tour.  We jumped in the car and headed towards the next castle ruin, but first required some food.  Along the way we stopped at a fish and chip joint which was delicious!

After some fish and chips we headed to our next castle ruin which would start the trend of none tourist attraction almost all to ourselves castles.  This one was called Invergarry Castle and we were the only ones there.  There was a fence around it, but there was a very easy path to get in. We explored these ruins for a bit then headed to the next one.

We continued our drive around the Loch and stopped at a few more places for photo ops.

We then headed towards the next stop which was an old barracks in the highlands.  Called Ruthven Barracks they were built in 1719 and are built on a former castle ruin.

After a quick scotch break, we headed to the next ruin!

The next stop was another castle ruin nearby called Duffus castle.  I thought this funny because i used to call my sister Dinkus Dorkus Dufus John and so this was her castle.

We walked around this castle for a bit and enjoyed the ruins and then headed to our next stop, which actually ended up being a bonus stop that we basically just followed the signs to.

It was called Brodie castle and was more like a giant mansion than a castle.

we explored the grounds for a bit and then headed to the next stop for sunset.

We then headed to the next stop which was one of my favorite ruins.  It was called Rait castle and we watched the sunset from it.  It was very remote and we were the only ones there.  We climbed up to the second floor and watched from the window.

We had a really chill sunset experience and then headed back to the hostel for a decently chill night of live music and a bit of beer.

The next morning it was time for me to go to the airport for my flight to Northern Ireland.  I returned the car at the airport and then jumped on my quick flight to Belfast.  I wrote a whole bunch of postcards in the Inverness airport lounge and then somehow lost them in the shuffle.  Very unfortunate.