Note: Events described here occurred on the 20th August 2012.
I am only on Day 15 of a 25-day holiday. This is truly taking forever as I try to recall the details of my holiday.
So we leave Whitebridge early to get to Inverness where we planned to take a boat trip out to see if we could catch some Dolphins.
It did not start well as the boat owner said: “There is no guarantee you’ll see dolphins. So treat this as a boat trip.”
And indeed, it was quite a picturesque one. Out into the bay we went, under the Kessock Bridge.
And we didn’t see any dolphins. The boat turned around and we were heading back toward the docks, when at the very last minute they came out. But they barely played.
Still, it was fun just to see the little of them. We can still claim to have seen dolphins, right?
So into Inverness town we headed. In Gaelic, it means “Mouth of the River Ness”. It’s the only city in the Scottish Highlands.
We strolled along the River Ness, and crossed over the little islands in the middle connected by little bridges.
Okay, some are not so little.
We admired Inverness Castle from afar, watched men in rubber overalls fish and met a lady with two very nice Shetland Sheepdogs. We’d been looking for Shetland Sheepdogs in Shetland islands, but they only seem to keep border collies there.
Lunch in Inverness was not worth talking about. And we left there in the late afternoon for Shin Falls.
This time, we drove over Kessock Bridge and stuck to the highway before turning off the A9, onto the B9176 toward Falls of Shin and Lairg, where we planned to spend the night.
The Falls of Shin were wonderful, spoiled only by the presence of those pesky midges. It was here that I started to feel their stinging bite. And the scars from their bites are still present all over me slowly fading away.
Why were the Falls of Shin so wonderful? Well because, for the very first time, I managed to catch the sight of salmon leaping upstream!
I’ve gone to Canada, to the US to try and catch them, but it was always slightly too late, or too early. And I always had to pay to get to these places. This one was completely free.
We spent quite a bit of time there, watching most of the salmon try, but not make it upstream. We were so excited, we actually didn’t mind the midges after a while.
Then it was off to Lairg, which was not too far away.
Lairg is a small town. And I enjoyed the sunset there.
We stayed at the Saddler’s House B&B run by Mrs Brinklow. The rooms were very neat and clean and the setup practical. The attached bathrooms were well sized.
Mrs Brinklow was very welcoming and gave us tea and her sister’s fruitcake. We learnt that she had been in Singapore in the 60s with her husband who was in the army. Even though we didn’t know Mrs Brinklow, we were still saddened to learn that her husband just passed away late last year, as did her daughter not too long later, a victim of cancer. It is funny how you can learn quite a lot about people in a short span of time.
I can still clearly recall Mrs Brinklow’s thoughtful tone as she said: “I always said there’d be more people in Scotland, if not for the midges.”