I'm DONE with walking everywhere!

Tuesday, May 19, 2026

Inverness, Scotland

Weather: raining pretty hard before we left the B&noB but stopped as we left the place. Warming up, too. 14 degrees and looking good down the road.

We left the place about 10:00 am and got a latte at the trailer parked on the side of the river about 10:15. Good latte, too. We walked into Old Town and chose a place to eat  breakfast, had a bite then proceeded to the museum. Normally, you might expect that we would head to the castle first but given that it is not a medieval castle, out motivation for it wasn't too high.

While the museum was not too big, it was surprisingly full, with a lot of emphasis on prehistoric geological features, fossils, then history from around 7,000 BC (I don't think they meant British Columbia) to the current century. I thought it was excellent and when you ultimately visit Scotland, you should have it on your list to visit.

Some fossils from the Inverness area. I'm sorry that the museum lighting was not too conducive for photography.

Charter of Edona. You may have to zoom in to read that Latin.

We spent three hours in there and, as with most places with a written history, we glossed over a lot of it. 

We walked up to the castle but didn't go in, just took a few pictures of the river and streets from the walls. I'll have to say that Inverness is an amazingly beautiful city with the River Ness cutting a narrow swath through its centre. The city has installed at least two foot bridges close to the downtown, making traversing the river easy and pleasant.

We cut through a bone yard and inspected a number of tombstones. Past readers of this blog will know of my affinity for grave yards: I'm always fascinated to find the oldest tombstones I can read and imagine what life would have been like for those individuals. Nan is also a fan of looking at the tombstones.

This was the oldest tombstone that I could identify. Many others we degraded much more and perhaps, older.

We found our way to outdoor seating so that we could taste some local suds. Surprisingly to us, we have been hard pressed to find "craft" beer here but today we had some good luck and drank some beer from Loch Ness, which is just down the road from here.

We then stopped for dinner at a pub from which we had smelled cooking earlier in the day but they deigned us not worthy to serve. I suspect that they wouldn't serve us because we seated ourselves in the bar. I heard the waitress say to the bartender "they can wait" but we didn't. We did end up having a good dinner - and healthy, up until dessert at least - elsewhere and after enjoyed a.long circuitous route back to the B&noB. We were out for nine hours, mostly on our feet, which are a little sore tonight.

Nervous/excited for tomorrow as we are heading to Muir of Ord, a whole two train stops away, to pick up the motorcycle. The train ride is 21 minutes, about the same time it will take us to walk to the train station.

Some random pictures, not historically notable but interesting to see on our walk back to the guest house.

Woo hoo! This guest house room even comes with a clothes dryer for items washed in the sink, and it works great!

Since we are heading out to the west coast, we decided we better get ourselves some protection against "midges", which are biting insects predominant in the western Highlands. I had heard from one B&B hostess we will be visiting next week that the midges have arrived for the season. We stopped in at an outdoor shop and this was the recommendation.  We bought spray repellent.