We’ve spent the last 10 days in Inverness, Scotland, exploring, sightseeing, relaxing, resting, and celebrating. Below is a photo diary of the last 10 days. 🙂
The River Ness flows about 12 miles north from Loch Ness. It’s a beautiful river with lovely walking paths running alongside it and great views of Inverness. While we haven’t spotted the Loch Ness Monster, yet, apparently, the first claimed sighting of the monster was in the River Ness in 569 AD!
Our first views of the River were from the Inverness Castle, which is situated on a cliff above the River.
We strolled south along the river. This side was called the Ladies Walk. (The other side was called the Ness Walk.)
We walked past several bridges…
…to an old bridge that brought us to the Ness Islands. The Ness Islands are full of cool natural benches, great walking paths (lots of dogs), small brooks and cascades, and a wide variety of large, old trees.
On the other side of the river, we saw a large sports indoor and outdoor complex, an ice rink (no open skating while we were there :/), a botanical garden, and a PLAYGROUND! 🙂
The Ness Walk side of the river on our way back to the city center.
At night, several of the bridges and trees nearby were decorated with lights for Christmas.
This one even changed colors!
Lovliness in Inverness…
Baking cookies…and sharing them with the owner of our apartment, who said she’d buy them, if we sold them! 🙂
Rainbows — we’ve seen three of them while we were here! One last week, one on Christmas, and one today (Boxing Day)!
Flowers, chocolates, and a Christmas card with an ornament from our apartment owner!
As for the illness…well, we all ended up with “heavy colds,” along with the Queen! (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/25/queen-absent-christmas-church-service-sandringham-recovers-heavy/)
As a result, sadly, we missed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day church services, sparing the citizens of Inverness our sneezing, sniffly, runny, stuffy noses and coughing!
Here are the kids and I with our water and rolls of toilet paper (more economical than individual Kleenex boxes!).
Christmas! Despite all of us being under the weather, we still enjoyed the day — being together…
Going for a short walk… (Here’s the Christmas rainbow again, and doesn’t the roof above the front door look like a crown?)
Watching the Royal Christmas Broadcast…
Playing charades and crackers…
Enjoying a tasty dinner…(The cook wasn’t crabby…just serious!)
…and doing lots of resting!
Mike found this article (http://mentalfloss.com/article/89676/10-uk-christmas-traditions-confuse-americans) yesterday on Christmas traditions in the U.K. and discovered that we’ve participated in 8 out of 10 of these items one way or another, without evening trying! We’ll work on taking part in #3 before the end of the season!
Happy Christmas!!
Merry Christmas all Ye lads and lasses. We had stomach flu go around here. ‘Tis the season for sharing and togetherness! Have a great birthday celebration, L.