Bangs Are So Cute!

Wednesday May 27, 2026

Ullapool, Scotland

Distance traveled: 156 km. Cumulative distance: 3020 km

Weather: Best weather day of our entire trip. Woke up to sunny skies all around, started out at 14 degrees and reached as high as 22 degrees. 

On our second night at the last B&B, we had to move rooms. This was because when I booked the room back in early March, they only had one room available on each night, and we had to move from a bigger room to a smaller room. The second night was a "twin" as opposed to a "double". It has been a long time since we stayed anywhere that only had twin beds. In fact, I can remember: it was on the Alaska Highway Ferry ride where our cabin berth had only twin beds. We have always slept in the same bed no matter the size and last night was no exception. However, about 1:30 am I ended up moving to my own bed because someone, who shall remain nameless but not me, had all the covers.

We were excited for the day because the weather started out so promising with hardly a cloud anywhere. In the world.  Today, the road was the destination as we were riding down the west side of Scotland with plans to divert from the "official" North Coast 500 route and do some off-the-beaten-track roads.

This is real "Highlands" country. Early in the day, we were riding over high (for Scotland) passes that took us through some  dramatic mountains. Unlike our Rockies, which are young mountains compared to these mountains, these have been worn down through the millions of years of weather and ice ages, leaving low mountains, wide valleys and little soil.

The road was single lane for a good part of the day, and early on, we had this in our way. Literally. Even though there are signs every several miles indicating slower traffic should move over into a passing spot to allow other, faster drivers to "overtake", this motorhome ahead of us never bothered. The driver did dutifully move over then a vehicle came from the opposite direction but somehow could stay over long enough to allow the numerous vehicles behind him to pass. After several miles, the road briefly widened to two lanes and it was our opportunity to pass, though sadly, it wasn't long enough to allow many vehicles behind us to make it around. If you are able to click on this picture to show it full view, you may be able to see that there are numerous, similar camper vans on the road ahead of us.

The Highland Cow is a very famous icon of the Scottish Highlands. There are a million t-shirts, stuffed animals, statuettes, tea towels, lamps, towels, ash trays, posters, scarves, pottery pieces and I am sure plenty of other things, that are emblazened with Highland Cows. It is SO iconic, we just expected we would see them everywhere. Well, I saw a farmyard with five about a week ago. Until today, Nan hadn't seen one. Then we came to this field and there were six or seven. It was clear that we weren't the only ones vacationing in the Scottish Highlands who were hoping to see a Highland Cow because there was an absolute traffic jam on the road beside this field with people stopping (inappropriately) to get out of their vehicles to take pictures. 

Bangs are so cute!

Ardvreck Castle

I apologize for doing this to you because after this, you will never be able to remember the name "Ardvreck" Castle but Nan and I have been calling it "Aardvark" Castle.

Located on Loch Assynt, it was built around 1490 by the MacLeod Clan of Assynt and is probably most famous for royalist James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, sought shelter with the MacLeods in 1650 after the Battle of Carbisdale. MacLeod betrayed Graham and handed him over to the Covenanter (Presbyterian Scottish nationalists) forces and Graham was executed.

Some decades later, the castle was captured by Clan MacKenzie, who took control of the surrounding farm lands and orchards but MacKenzie's wife wanted something "more modern" and Calda House was build, just a few steps away from Aardvark.

The MacKenzies later fell into financial ruin and Calda House burned under mysterious circumstances.

This is the road less traveled. Roads here in the U.K. seem to be designated with letter grades to indicate their importance. For example, "M" indicates motorway (what we would call a highway), followed by a number to indicate which one it is, "A" is a primary road, though where we are located, that could still indicate a single lane road, and so on. Well, this is a "C" road. My usual rule is to only ride roads that have Google Street View available, mainly so that I can be confident that it is paved. 

As happens here fairly frequently, we loose navigation when my phone looses the GPS connection. That can happen when passing under trees, in cities amongst buildings, or just when there is no satellite passing overhead. That's not serious, it usually comes back fairly fast but if we are in an area with no cell service, then Google Maps cannot calculate the route. So, we had pulled over on this extremely narrow road to try to get the route back and the truck you see in this photo pulled up behind us because there was some oncoming traffic. We had already had a couple of close calls coming around blind corners and encountering oncoming traffic and since I wasn't getting any signal, I waved the truck ahead of us. This way, he could be the one to meet oncoming traffic and as long as I kept behind him, we would not be at risk of having a head on collision with someone coming around a blind corner. I actually had to hurry to keep up; this was clearly a local driver who knew the road and despite the fact that I felt we were safe behind him, I still hurried to keep on his tail. It was important that we be close enough so that if he pulled over, we could pull over behind him at the same time. It was a little hair-raising. Even for me. 

When the driver pulled over to his property, I waved at him to thank him but either he didn't see me or didn't understand why some crazy motorcycler was waving at him.

We made it to Ullapool by about 2:00 pm, uncharacteristically early for us. It was getting very warm on the bike as the temperature was up, the sun was shining, so we were ok with being at our destination early. I said to Nan we were encountering a problem I hadn't anticipated: that we would have too many clothes. We don't have much room in our panniers to shed layers; tomorrow is a no-agenda day and Friday it is supposed to turn cold and wet so we may go back to our old issue of bundling up to stay warm. 

We presented ourselves at our B&B much earlier than is generally accepted and they invited us to shed our gear and come back when the rooms were ready but then upon review, decided they would let us check into the one room that was ready. That was a real bonus as it allowed us to get out of our regular motorcycle clothes and into some "civies".

This camper prison is directly in front of our B&B, though it is down the slope so we cannot seem them however, we did see this ferry pass by on its way to Stornoway.

The campers extend all the way around the point.

We found a pub with chairs out front across the street from the harbour. 

Motorcycle campers in the