Things To Do In Inverness When You Have A Full Afternoon Free

1) Go to local mall, find Starbucks, run laptop battery down in a feverish attempt to update blog/Facebook/check email.

2) Catch a football match in a pub; have lunch in same. Celtic and Motherwell played to a 1-1 draw, in case you were wondering.

3) Take some pictures of the town.4) Wait for over three hours in the Inverness train station (it's not even a nice train station!) for the Sleeper.

Drum wasn't very cold, even at night. This is probably due to the loch. Inverness was stupid cold. Like low 30s cold, which I am now no longer accustomed to, apparently! I think it really wasn't that cold but the wind was insanely cold. And out here, train stations are enclosed but the tracks lead into the station, so the station is effectively open to the cold and wind. So I was sitting inside but not really. An old drunk guy asked me for 50p, and I gave it to him. I have so much change now it's ridiculous.

The last hour or so of waiting, I conversed with an old lady named Chrissy who was going back home to some town out in the suburbs somewhere. She was coming back from her sister-in-law's funeral up near John O'Groats, which is well known as the furthest place north you can drive in Britain. She was pretty cool. She was telling me how she's never been on a plane before, but her son is taking her to Chicago and Minneapolis in June. Sounds like fun!

I liked the sleeper train, but I bought a single ticket and got a cabin with two bunks. This got me wondering - did someone buy the other bunk? Is some strange person going to be joining me in this cramped cabin, trapped in a room with my farts all night? Well, the sleeper stopped making stops around midnight, so I was able to get to sleep eventually.

Next morning, it was off the train before 8 and off to drop off my bags at the hotel. Through some stroke of good fortune, I was able to get my room right away instead of waiting until 2:00 for check-in. HOORAY FOR SHOWERS.

After that, it was breakfast and back to the British Museum for some photos and stuff, saw stuff I missed earlier. The original Hokusai Great Wave print they had on display has already been rotated out for the work of another ukiyo-e artist. Oh well.

Stopped at some souvenir shops. Now I'm sitting in Starbucks, checking in for my flight tomorrow, and getting you all up to date. Maybe I'll post tomorrow before I leave.

I WILL BE HAVING PIZZA FOR DINNER TOMORROW NIGHT, I'LL TELL YOU THAT RIGHT NOW.

The Highland Search For Our Underwater Ally

So I arrived in Inverness early on a rainy, cold Friday afternoon and decided that all my clothes were smelly and I needed to find a laundromat. (BTW, over here they are called launderettes.) After consulting my Lonely Planet book and taking care of THAT problem, I hopped another expensive taxi to the lovely village of Drumnadrochit. Say that ten times fast. Don't even try; even the locals just call it Drum.

I stayed at the Benleva Hotel, a charming b&b (dogs welcome!) with a great central location in Drum. They are well known locally for their bar, which is pretty much full of locals all day long (and I do mean all day). On Friday night, I talked to a local woman who was Irish and had been to Connecticut and a lot of other places, including the Middle East. She was a nurse and told me how much better the healthcare system is here in the UK and how they recoil in horror that Americans only get two weeks vacation. Then again, they have a 60 hour work week here, but it still sounds like a fair trade. I dunno what I would do with 6 weeks off. Probably be a happier person, I guess.

The way people I’ve met have been talking, it’s clear that the world at large was pretty embarrassed (for Americans) that we had a president as retarded as the last guy. Also, people out here were not sure if Sarah Palin was supposed to be a joke or not. But they all feel bad for Obama because of all the stuff going on now that they feel really isn’t his fault. The more I read in the paper, the more I think that everyone at the SEC has been playing Spider Solitaire for the past ten years.

This lady also advised me not to have dinner at the Benleva, but instead to take a walk down to the Loch Ness Inn down the road. The Loch Ness Inn has a very cute logo but was way more expensive then the Benleva as far as accommodation, but the attached restaurant was really good, and reasonably priced.There’s not much going on here in Drum apart from all the Loch Ness tourist centres competing for my attention. Up the road a bit is Urquhart Castle, where many of the Nessie sightings have occurred. I walked there (about 3.5 km away) Saturday morning. It was pretty neat. It’s a ruin, not a proper castle, but you can walk up the tower and stuff. There was also a very large gift shop.

A few words about the loch: I could immediately see why so many people have said they’ve seen stuff in the loch. There are so many random factors that can cause you to see stuff. First and foremost are the waves. The loch has some serious chop, all the time. Little whitecaps top all the waves, and they go in various directions. Add to that schools of fish, swimming deer, sturgeons, eels migrating up from the Sargasso Sea (Loch Ness opens out to the ocean), floating tree trunks, and summer heat mirages and Loch Ness becomes the perfect place to see whatever kind of mysterious creature you're looking for.I was supposed to go on a pony trek Saturday afternoon, but I decided instead to take it easy and do as little as possible (since I've had little time on this trip to JUST RELAX), so I hit up the better of the two Loch Ness centres. Their museum-quality multimedia presentation concludes that no, there probably isn’t a creature in the loch BUT THEN AGAIN WHO KNOWS. There are an obscene number of Nessie Beanie Babies in the gift shop (which I’m sure are now worth less than nothing), and if I had $200 I could have gotten a really nice kilt. I got a few neat souvenirs for you guys but sorry, they didn’t have any remote-controlled or even inflatable Loch Ness Monsters.

After that I popped off for dinner down the street at the Loch Ness Inn again. Once dinner was finished, it was back to the Benleva for a few pints. A bunch of the regulars came storming in after bowling all afternoon and kept the place lively. Good bunch of people. Apparently a guy from Drum is stationed in Syria with the military and he’s getting married and a bunch of the locals are going out to Syria for the wedding like it’s no big deal. Syria! Sure, just pack a bag and go to Syria for the weekend. People in the UK just travel anywhere. Anyway, at around 10:00 it was off to bed.

Things I learned: I am not allergic to dogs (hooray!); I am too fat to go pony trekking anyway (how many people weigh less than 160 lbs?); Urquhart Castle was blown up on purpose.

Things I saw: a dreadlocked Scotsman named Alex; a museum-quality trebuchet; sheep; more kilts in one room than I ever thought I would see; the Loch Ness Monster; highland cows.