Edinburgh-Inverness - Day 12

We got up early this morning to finish packing as we need to be out of our apartment to make our way to Thrifty to pick up the car by 9am. We were lucky to hail down a cab pretty much straight outside our apartment. The driver is an older Scottish guy and he is fantastic, asking us loads of questions and giving us some good advice about our road trip. We get to Thrifty and there is no BMW available. Instead, we are advised we are get an upgrade to a Land-rover Discovery, the Deluxe model with all the fruit, you little beauty! We pile our gear in the back and hit the road. We decide we will do the full route, that is, head to Stirling (to see our first road trip castle) before heading back through Perth rather than go the short way straight to Perth. This proved to be a big early mistake. When we got to Stirling it was pouring with rain so we decided not to get out of the car, a big wasted effort. When we get to Perth we grab some lunch and we realise time is already starting to get away from us and we need to get a move on if we want to fit everything in. We get back on the road and we take the route where the big green sign says "Inverness". Ummm, second big mistake, we are meant to be going to Inverness via Aberdeen. We open up our map book (that we purchased of £1.99) and we try and work out which way we should be going. We come to the conclusion we need to do a u-turn and head back to Perth. It gets worse, we don't know where the hell we are going by now and we find ourselves do circles around the perimeter of Perth for about 45 mins. It's at this point we decide to employ the services of Cheryl, the onboard navigation system. Our initial dealings with Cheryl were very frustrating and a lot of yelling ensued, mostly by me, actually all by me. This is how Cheryl got her name. I found it difficult to communicate with a machine so I needed to give it a name that aided my yelling of the words SHUT UP. So it became SHUT UP CHERYL. It was at this point as we were doing bog laps around Perth that we decided to alter our route and take the road to Blairgowrie. That was our next mistake because this road was a small winding road that took us ages to get there. Now it is nudging 2:30 and we've hardly gone anywhere. We stop in at the Blairgowrie tourist shop and a woman advises us that our best bet would be to take the M9 motorway straight to Inverness because we can't possibly fit in what we want to do. So We get back in the car and I give Cheryl instructions to take us to Inverness. I'm a bit dejected at this point as my whole first day's planning has gone out the window. The drive from this point on did prove to be very nice and the scenery was spectacular so not all was lost. We arrive at Inverness and check in to our hotel. The hotel is about a 10-15 minute walk to the city centre so that's the first thing we do. Inverness is only small but bigger than we had expected and it is a very pretty place. We spend about an hour walking around before heading back to the hotel for dinner. After dinner we head back to our room (which is a 1 room apartment) and we hit the sack. Tomorrow I want to be up early.

The rental car

The photo before "the pit stop"



The photo after "the pit stop"
(I promised Kris I would not show the photos I took of her with her pants around her ankles during "the pit stop")