Ullapool

Tuesday, 17 September 2019

Another great night in the pod (ours is the second from the right) which is good since i have to drive over 6 hours today to Ullapool. 

If we actually went the shortest distance to Ullapool, it would only be 120 miles and take 2.75 hours to drive, but we will be folliwing the Wester Ross Coastal Trail as suggested by Rick Steves.  This makes the drive over 200 miles and takes 6 hours to complete.

Here is a look at the drive we are doing.  Definitely not the most direct line between two points.

By the way, we are really getting north here in Scotland.  Ullapool is the red marker.  We are almost at the top of the UK.

The drive was amazing.  I can't believe how incredibly beautiful Scotland is.

We turned left on a road that had multiple warning signs about taking an alternate route to get to the same place and stating that the road may be impassable in the winter.  This pass is called Bealach na Bà (Gaelic for Pass of the Cattle).  It was a one lane road with passing pullouts every so often.  Check out this part of the pass!

We made it up and over the pass into the small town of Applecross.  Here we stopped for a break and had a picnic on one of the tables out by the water.  While there, 3 incredible sports cars pulled into the lot.  We saw these cars earlier on the road, but now we could get a better look.  They were a Bentley Continental Supersports, McLaren 675 LT, and a Lamborghini Huracan Spyder Convertible.  Collectively we are talking about around $900,000 worth of cars here.

The three super cars pulled out just before us, and we saw them on the road in front of us along with some more incredible scenery.

I then caught up to them. To be fair, the conditions of the road were not the best, so they had to slow down for many holes in the road.  Also, when a car aproached head on, everyone had to slow to almost a stop. 

It was pretty fun watching them in front of me for a while.  They all pulled off into a smoked fish market.  I was tempted to stop as well, but I was pretty anxious to get to Ullapool since we have been on the road for 5 hour now and we still have 3 hours of driving left.

So, we continued on enjoying the scenery.

Finally, just after 4 PM, we pulled into Ullapool and our AirBnB.  Ullapool is a small town of about 1,500 people.  For us, it is really only a stopover between a long drive today and a long drive tomorrow to get to the ferry to the Orkney Islands. 

After settling into our AirBnB, we walked the 10 minutes into town to find dinner.  It really is a cute town.

The highly-rated seafood shack was closed today, so we wound up at a overly priced restaurant attached to a hotel.  The food was OK. but the view out the window was beautiful.  Tim snapped this photo as the ferry left the terminal and went right by our window.

After dinner we walked back to the AirBnB walking along the waterfront.

We got back to the AirBnB around 6:30 PM.  Early enough to relax and catch up on the blog.  There isn't a TV here, but there is a CD player with multiple traditional Scottish music discs, so we sit here and listen to one after another of people singing Gaelic Scottish songs.  Not a bad way to spend an evening.