We're in the highlands

I'll tell you more very soon....

Suffice to say, we're in the most romantic place I've ever been and I'm in love with the most precious girl in the world.

(It's now "very soon"!)
We woke up this morning and had a wonderful home cooked breakfast at the guesthouse. The owner makes her own marmalade and although I'm not usually a fan we felt obliged to try it. It was better than any I've tried before.

We then spent the morning exploring Edinburgh properly. It's truly a beautiful city, shame most of the buildings were covered in scaffolding. The cathedral in particular is well worth a visit and they have volunteers there to answer any questions you may have. She told us that many of the stained glass windows were removed by a bishop in about 1800 because he thought they suggested the people of Edinburgh were illiterate!

His thinking was thus: "Stained glass windows depict bible stories to people who can't read. We can all read now, so lets get rid of them to prove it..." and proceeded to replace what were probably beautiful windows with plain ones.

Edinburgh also has a Dungeons thing which made us laugh. The posters and advertised features seem to be identical to the one in York. We went to the castle but didn't actually go in, we were running short of time.

As tt is from Australia she'd been really cold since arriving in the UK. She bought a lovely warm coat in Edinburgh in the hope of finding snow later.

We left Edinburgh by the impressive forth bridge and began to drive into the highlands.

On the way we stopped Pitlochry to see a "salmon ladder". You may wonder how salmon could possibly use a ladder? Well, they put their tail on the first rung and then use their little finny things to...Sorry! No, it's actually a series of plataues in a river than helps them get upstream to the spawning ground - because some inconsiderate bastard has built a power station over the route they used to take. If you're really interested, it's all explained here. It wasn't the right season to visit and we only saw 1 fish.

The destination I had in mind was Avimore, a place I remember going to when I was a kid. As we got closer the traffic news on the radio told us a road about 50miles away was blocked by snow. That was a postive sign, although it was wonderfully sunny where we were at the time.

I needn't have worried though, as we got higher into the mountains, so the snow began to fall. When we arrived there was a light dusting of snow. Not quite as good as I'd hoped but we were yet to have our little miracle...

We'd just checked into the quaintest bed and breakfast, one with an open log fire and everything. It's very romantic. Darkness fell about 6pm and we then occupied ourselves in the luxurious bedroom for a few hours. When we decided to go out for food about 9pm our miracle had begun. Under the cover of darkness about 3 inches of snow had fallen, the whole villiage was like a scene from a christmas card.

We ate in a place with real character, "Skiing Doo", the walls are covered with memorabilia from all over the world with no particular theme. It's a party place as well as a restaurant. Shame they don't have a website. Afterwards we scrunched back to our b & b and I was very envious of tt's new coat, but sharing it was fun. We sat by the open fire alone for a while then went to bed. Snow exploring tomorrow!

Woke: Ediburgh
Bed: Aviemore
Done: 130 miles (again!)