It continued being unseasonably cold in Inverness and very windy.
We took a bus tour around town. It was a Hop-on Hop-off brand bus, seemingly popular in Europe, where you buy a day’s ticket and can ride as much as you want and get on and off at will. They also have audio commentary throughout the ride, remarking on features as you pass them.
At one point the bus crosses a canal and is talking about the locks and the lochs, very hard to differentiate by ear.
We walked across a foot bridge to a couple small islands in the River Ness and visited the Botanical Gardens.
The gardens had all sorts of flowering plants, cactus, shrubs, and even vegetables. On a cold day, it really felt good to go into the “tropical house”, even though it was probably on in the 60’s, it felt warm and wonderful.
We also stopped at a weaver’s shop, where you can watch them make wool cloth or tartans. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any one doing it while we were there. The shop had huge amounts of clothes, mostly wool, and souvenirs and a large selection of Scotch whiskey.
I did finally realize why the day seems so long, besides all the walking of course. I checked a program on my phone and got that we were at latitude 57.5, less than 9 degrees from the Arctic Circle, above which you can have at least one day without any sunset.
This also helps explain the cold.
We had to get up early to catch the plane, so I set my alarm on my phone. Early the next morning we were awoken by a loud alarm, but it wasn’t mine. The fire alarm was going off.
We went down, but when I got to the bottom of the stairway, it was just me and another girl. It appears that everyone else decided to ignore safety protocol and take time to get their shoes and jackets and such. Meanwhile, I am standing there in just my pants, no shoes, no shirt. At least I wasn’t wearing shorts.
Since we were up and everyone else was up, we went ahead and took our things and headed next door to the bus stop.
Upon check in at the Inverness airport, they had no record of mom’s flight info and I find out that the airline had changed my schedule after I had already landed in Europe. Since I had a print out of the bookings, the clerk issued a ticket for mom anyway and required us to check in at the next airport, Manchester, in order to fix the scheduling.
I noticed that our seats were not together, despite the seat next to me being empty. So I was able to stretch out a bit on the flight.
When I got home, I realized that I had forgotten where I hid the keys on the back porch, and I didn’t have a light to look for them. But one of the doors wasn’t closed firmly so I was able to get in and turn on the back light. Took me several minutes to find them.