DAY-11: Leaving The North Coast
Day – 11: Saturday, September 2, 2017
Starting Location: Dunnet, Scotland, UK
Ending Location: Inverness, Scotland, UK
As we were in no hurry this morning we did some additional travel planning deciding to keep the rental car and continue our journey through Scotland, into Wales and finish in England returning the car to the London Heathrow airport before our flight to Dublin on September 14th.
With the modified plans in place we departed en-route to Inverness where we would spend the night before heading into southern Scotland.
The drive was interesting in that our alternate route took us along the north coast past Thurso and on to Golval. We passed the Dounreay nuclear power facility (borrowed image below), the home of much British testing of nuclear power and energy applications beginning in the 1950's.
The facility similar to the Hanford facility in Washington is a "superfund UK equivalent site" and has a long-term decommissioning plan. In this area, the nuclear age is in the past, the focus is now on off shore fossil fuels and wind energy.
These two pictures offer some perspective as to the size of commercial wind mills. Can you see the man working on the windmill just behind the building?
We continued through the country, an area of fishing streams, forestry and farms on some very small roads meaning one lane with occasional pull-outs for oncoming traffic to pass.
The good news is that drivers are polite and courteous and throughout the drive there was never a real issue when meeting traffic; that said on these roads there was very little traffic. Eventually we joined up with the A9 and continued toward Inverness ...
but not before a stop at the Glen Morangie Distillery near Tain. We had a brief visit and a sample of the product before resuming the route south.
Our home for the night was the Best Western Lochlarne in Inverness. We had dinner and retired for the evening with time allowed for the usual Internet necessities.
As we were in no hurry this morning we did some additional travel planning deciding to keep the rental car and continue our journey through Scotland, into Wales and finish in England returning the car to the London Heathrow airport before our flight to Dublin on September 14th.
With the modified plans in place we departed en-route to Inverness where we would spend the night before heading into southern Scotland.
The drive was interesting in that our alternate route took us along the north coast past Thurso and on to Golval. We passed the Dounreay nuclear power facility (borrowed image below), the home of much British testing of nuclear power and energy applications beginning in the 1950's.
These two pictures offer some perspective as to the size of commercial wind mills. Can you see the man working on the windmill just behind the building?
Here's a closer look.
We continued through the country, an area of fishing streams, forestry and farms on some very small roads meaning one lane with occasional pull-outs for oncoming traffic to pass.
Our home for the night was the Best Western Lochlarne in Inverness. We had dinner and retired for the evening with time allowed for the usual Internet necessities.
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