Sunday May 31, 2026    

Inverness, Scottland

Distance traveled: 85 km Cumuative distance: 3406 km

Weather: Cloudy to start, light showers off and on, more so twoards Inverness. Occasional wind. We saw some patches of blue sky. Twice.

We didn't make too big an effort to get on the road early because we were subjected to some other constraints. I had booked train tickets for us from Muir of Ord, where we were returning the motorcycyle to Inverness, where we are catching a bus to the Edinburgh airport tomorrow morning, for 2:50 pm so there really wasn't much point in showing up at the motorcycle hire place with no place to go until the train was coming.  

We were on the road by about 10:30 am and though it there was some single lane roads heading out of Lochcorran, after twenty or thirty miles it transformed into a pedestrian two lane road.  Despite this, it was actually fairly entertaining as far as motorcycle roads go. Curvy by not twisty, room enough to carve the turns withour fear of plowing head on into oncoming traffic or slipping off the side of the road into the ditch. i.e. "fun, without being taxing". 

Rather than proceeding directly to the motorcycle hire place, we made a morning of it by doing a side trip to Redstone Castle.  This was, in fact, past our destination for the morning but a half dozen miles or so but allowed me to tick off another castle. I love visiting the bronze age and iron age buildings, especially those that it is possible to identify how the place probably looked in its heyday. Redstone Castle was originally built in 1179 - and it now resides in somebody's back yard - though it is closed to any traffic because it is considered "unsafe"  to walk inside. Sadly, it is largely derelict, though a sign out front implies that the owners have a desire to remediate the castle to some degree, though their ultimate intenet was not revealed. Looking at the exterior and through the gated windows, it appeared to us that the building would require a great deal of money to make it look like something worth visiting (and paying an entry fee) or even safe enough to walk around inside the structure. Stones were falling off the castle and there was a lot of refuse inside and the walls seemed to be collapsing. I suspect that there are a lot of ancient structures in the United Kingdom and Ireland that would be interesting to visit if the owners had the money to restore such buildings. In the mean time, the buildings fall further into ruin, further from being reclaimed and unless somebody can claim a lineage to the building's owners, nobody is interested in restoring one of a thousand sites around the UK that may or may not have any connection to the present. But there is something other-worldly wondering around a 900 year old ghost of a structure where battles had been fought and ghosts roamed. Notwithstanding the fabulous places we visited, I would rather wander around a place like this, litereally falling down around us,  than an operational place that had been done up to look like mediaeval place but was only 150 years old. The "modern" version still has merit but there is nothing like the history of the last milleneum.

I'll have to say that I said to Nan on the ride today that "I must be getting old" because I am already getting tired of the rain and the wind. Even though this is only our third day in a row of bad weather - and I can say it is a lot better today than it has been the last couple of days -  the rain and especially the wind is wearing on me. By the same token, today's riding is certinly funner than it has been since Ullapool.

The above video is primarily in response to a request from my Parisienne friend Rod, who said I needed some video on the blog. Not particularly heart-pounding but it is at least a look of Scotland riding.

At Redstone, someone had planted Rhododendrons. 
Sure look beautiful for an invasive species. 

Once done with riding, we presented ourselves at Highland Motorcycle Hire in Muir of Ord and returned the bike. I promptly 'fessed up to owner Ray about us and the bike being blown over in the wind on Bad Luck na Ba, breaking the brake lever. He immediately dismissed it as nothing, that it would cost "pennies". I knew that as a BMW part, it would be much more than pennies. However, despite my insistence that I recognized it was "on my watch", he told me that if it had been a one or two day rental it would be different but for 12 days, I was covered. 

The scuffed handgurad and broken brake lever. The brake lever broke at an inflection point where the lever is designed to break in the event of an impact, leaving enough to be able to continue to use the lever after the mishap.

That was our bike, with the other returns of the day. 

Back in Inverness, we checked into our hotel, a short walk from the train staition and the bus depot. It's a little underwhelming but it's only one night.  We went to a restaurant we visited when we were here about two weeks ago, a little Mediterranean place that does a good job of the fish. The waiter immediately recognizes us, remembers where we sat and what we drank and brought us the same thing. However, we ordered dinner without him trying to remember what we had last time.