It’s been a day of flux. Of constantly changing plans. After a leisurely start Rosie and I, in John’s borrowed car planned to take off for our week-long Highland jaunt. All packed up, and Rosie says to me, “Have you got the car keys?”

“No, I’ve never had them. I thought you had them!”

Couldn’t find them in the house anywhere, so Rosie rang John at work who discovered them in his pocket! He could bring them to us on his lunch break. In the meantime, Rosie and I decided to walk to a nearby shopping centre for a Barclays Bank to get cash out. My credit card had to be cancelled today due to credit card fraud. We found the ATM at the Bank, where I inserted my Savings Card and it was promptly swallowed by the ATM because the card had expired yesterday! Rosie’s card still works so she’s taken out enough money for both of us for now.

John brought the car key at lunchtime and so off we set. The original plan was for me to drive and Rosie to navigate. She doesn’t actually have a licence to drive a manual car. But just after we’d started, John rang Rosie to say she is the only one licensed to drive it. So we swopped seats. Not only is is a manual car, but it’s got 6 gears! So off we set again , using Google maps to guide us. But 10 minutes into the journey, Google Maps had a major hiccup and turned us right around to go back the way we’d come and head off in a completely different direction! A bit disorientating!

We drove through the outskirts of Edinburgh and over the high Firth of Forth bridge – or is it Forth of Firth bridge? And then we were on our way – for the next 3 and half hours. A day of mostly sunshine, but the further north we went, the cloudier it got and we drove through a couple of showers of rain. There’s no air-conditioning in the car and the vents don’t work, so it often got muggy in the car. So we would wind the windows down for a few minutes till it got too noisy and windy and then we’d roll them back up again.

It was mostly highway driving north. And the further north we went, the higher the mountains. And the balder they got too. Lots of fir trees. The farmhouses changed from stone to being whitewashed. Drove through Inverness. Can’t tell you much about Inverness as we just navigated straight through, keeping our eye on Google Maps. Once we were through Inverness we headed south again to drive half way down the west side of Loch Ness which is much wider and longer than I’d ever imagined. Steep mountains on either side of the Loch and green, green huge, high trees and so much greenery. There’s “Nessie” stuff everywhere you look – exhibitions and boat rides and cafes – it’s endless.

Our next adventure was finding the Air BnB house we’d booked. We turned off the main, narrow road to head up a very, very steep narrow road that fell away sometimes on one side. The sign at the bottom of the hill says 20% gradient. Rosie kept insisting that she was not going to do a hill start in the car, no matter what! We tried to follow the written directions all the long way to the top of this hill that felt like a mountain. And right near the top, the car stalled. So Rosie quickly learnt – under great stress – how to do a hill start on a slope like Mt Everest. But we’d come to the wrong house! So, after some instructions from a man with a rake, we turned back down the road, and this time I was driving. But don’t tell John.

And we finally found it! At the end of a little road that crept round the side of the hill through green tunnels of huge oaks and over a narrow bridge crossing the burn (Scots for a stream). Jennie who sounds very English was so welcoming and we were shown to our twin share bedroom with low sloping ceilings with a nearby bathroom. The house is neither old nor very new, but comfortably nestled into the side of the hill. Nearby you can hear the constant sound of the the burn as it rushes down the mountain. We were so glad to finally get here! And we arrived in sunshine too! Just a few threatening clouds hanging about.

After being in the car so long, we were both aching for a walk and feeling hungry too. We asked Jennie and were relieved to know we could use our legs instead of the car to find a meal. We walked back down the hill, looking at Loch Ness away in the distance under the mountain and then down the main road to the village of Drumnadrochit to have dinner at at the local pub called The Fiddlers Green. I had trout and Rosie had a burger. She needed a lot of sustenance after such a stressful day. But she said that stressful as it was, she’d rather do that than go to work! A great meal in a bar with rows and rows of a thousand different types of whisky. The Scots seem a little obssessed with that drink!

As we were driving to Loch Ness today, I saw growing by the sides of the road, wild lupins and foxgloves, broom, gorse, patches of the purple heather and wild roses. So many plants that I had to carefully mollycoddle in my garden at Melbourne and don’t even attempt to grow in Perth. I can hear the sound of cattle lowing on the evening air as I’m finishing this up. It’s still so light even though it’s going on for 10 o’clock at night. It feels like 2pm of a Perth winter’s day!

No photos today because the internet won’t allow it!