Beaches and Bambis

On the last weekend of my stay in Scotland, I made one last trip to a place we never even came near to – the North Coast. It is not easy to get there; we had to take the bus to Inverness (4 hours) wait there (2 hours) and take the train (4 hours) to Thurso, a little town on the north east coast. We, that is Sandra and me, planned to spend two full days there. The first however, was spent like this:



You may ask "Why were you reading Henriikka's favourite book when you could have explored the coast?". The answer is very simple. We had such bad luck we could not get out of town. First, the Hostel owner (The hostel was called "Sandra's Hostel" by the way) gave us his bikes for free, but although they looked professional, Alessandros bike would have been way better! They were so bad we had to go back after about two miles. Then we wanted to take the bus out of bloody Thurso, but for some miraculous reason, we missed it or it missed us. We were waiting for it a long time, but when we went to ask, they told us we had missed it. So, we had no other choice than reading in the park.

Next day, we wanted to avoid another such catastrophe and so we rented a car. We were lucky this time and got the last rentable car in town! In spite of announced rain we headed west – and it was worth it. This is what we saw:









Yes, Scotland's North has countless wonderful, white sand beaches nobody seems to know about. They go more and more beautiful the further we went west until we reached Durness, the last town before the "Cape of Wrath" in the extreme north west. There I also saw this nice big house and I set my mind on buying it one day to make an Erasmus-Meeting-Point in Scotland out of it. For everyone of you who wants to go there and see the beaches. This is it:



We spent a wonderful second day and did not regret having made the trip and having spent a lot of money for it. If we had not made the car tour however, this is how I would have looked on the evening of the second day:



The day after we went home, Sandra and I went to Braemar to meet my family, who had been travelling around for the last week. We decided to go hiking and do the tour I had already done with Melanie and Elisa.



The weather was bad with occasional rain, but the view was great still! I really like this place!





The mountain we climbed is in the middle of a nature reserve where there are a lot of deer, or, as Melanie, Elisa and me called it, Bambis. When we were there in April we didn't see any, but this time I saw them. Not one, not two, but about sixty or seventy. They were far away (too far for a picture) but still very impressive.





After only watching TV for weeks and not moving at all, five hours of hiking are pretty tough! I was 'rubbish' when we came back to Braemar and only wanted to go home. To Switzerland! And if my plane does not fall down, I will be there in less than 48 hours!