CC BY: This photo was filched from conner395 on Flickr, because I'm rubbish with cameras.
So I’m back from my holiday in “somewhere near Inverness”. I say “somewhere” because in the Highlands of Scotland, you don’t get fancy placenames for everywhere, you just get rough placenames. And you don’t get exactly where you want with a satnav either. Just roughly.
I was in a set of lodges called the Kiltarlity Lodges. The Kiltarlity Lodges are actually a good distance from Kiltarlity itself, where I use “Kiltarlity” as a name for Kiltarlity Village, which is (according to the Kiltarlity Community Council) just what’s written on the signpost, and the village is actually called Allarburn.
Kiltarlity is apparently in Beauly, because all of the addresses in the area have the line ‘Kiltarlity, Beauly, Inverness-shire’ in them. But drive several miles down the road and you will be confronted by a sign welcoming you to Beauly itself. Hang on, you ask yourself, wasn’t I already in Beauly?
And so where exactly I was for the past week is a complete mystery. It’s pointless trying to pinpoint it exactly, so the closest you’re going to get is that I was near Inverness. That works.
CC BY-NC. From cradehall on Flickr, because I fail at taking pictures.
But yes, I was actually in Inverness at some point, at the Eastgate shopping centre. Amber recommended Ben and Jerry’s milkshake to me via Twitter (recommendations are a Very Good Use for Twitter, by the way) and I (eventually) went and bought one.
They cost £3.70, and they’re made by taking several scoops of your chosen ice cream flavour and blending them until you have one ice cream milkshake. And they’re very, very good. Very unhealthy too, I’d imagine, but when they taste this good, you really don’t care. I recommend that you have one: particularly if you live on an island with no Ben & Jerry’s and are going to go on holiday to somewhere that does have a Ben & Jerry’s. You can find one near you (assuming you’re in the UK) using their scoop shop locator. If you’re in the US, you can use this locator.
We also went to the Cairngorm Funicular Railway and went up the mountain itself. We were particularly lucky to get a lovely, clear day with good views from near the top of Cairn Gorm. I don’t actually have any of the pictures we took from the top here with me as I type this post, but I’ll try and post some at a later point so you can see what we saw. If you’d like to visit the Cairngorms National Park yourself (including Aviemore), they have a lovely tourism website. The area is particularly good for cyclists – almost the whole area is covered by the National Cycle Network - though I didn’t do any cycling there myself.
CC BY-NC. Inside the Loch Ness Exhibition Centre. This photo was taken by washuugenius on Flickr and not me. So you know.
Another destination was the 5-star Loch Ness Exhibition Centre, which contains a documentary lasting roughly 30 minutes on the subject of the infamous Loch Ness Monster. This documentary takes place in seven different “themed” rooms – you pass from one room to the next after each segment of the documentary – which immerse you completely in the information: almost literally in one room, which creates the illusion of being underwater. Naturally, we also drove past Loch Ness itself. And no, we didn’t see the monster. 
Where else? Oh, just Beauly (I recommend the House of Beauly’s restaurant, by the way), Dingwall (I don’t recommend Dingwall at all – sorry to those who live there), and – on the way back north – Wick and Thurso. I was also in Golspie for at least a few minutes on a toilet break, which must count for something. If you want a recommendation for going to Golspie, then I suggest the Coffee Bothy. I haven’t been in there, but it’s fairly close to a public toilet and therefore is just about the only place in Golspie I’ve seen. No really: why not go take a look at it if you’re ever in Golspie?
Other things I can recommend after going on this holiday:
- Waterstones in general, especially the one at 69 Eastgate Centre. It may not be as cheap as Amazon.co.uk but hey – there are comfy chairs and many bookshelves, some of which contain books you’ll want to read! I’ve registered for a Waterstones Card, just in case.
- Landmark Forest Adventure Park in Carrbridge is a great day out for families. Especially the Fire Tower, if you can get over the fact that you’re on such a high, rather shaky wooden structure (no really – just walking around on the top will cause it to shake). Which I couldn’t. Cause I’m a wimp.
- And a special mention, at least, should go to Big City Network station MFR (Moray Firth Radio), but only because it’s about twenty times better than my local commercial radio station. That still doesn’t make it any better than BBC Radio, but hey – it’s OK. Sort of.
Interested? You can find out more about most of the places I went to on the VisitHighlands.com site. Or, if you’re new to Scotland in general, you can find more information at WelcomeToScotland.com.
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Photos in this post were licensed under Creative Commons by those who took them. The photo of the Inverness sign is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. The Eastgate Shopping Centre photo and the Loch Ness Exhibition centre photo are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.o. Want to license your work under Creative Commons? Visit the license chooser at creativecommons.org.
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