Multicultural chillfest in Inverness

9:30 pm Inverness
3:30 pm St. Louis
2:30 pm Spearfish

I'm sitting in the lounge at my hostel watching Mythbusters with people from at least three other countries while the awesome Australian hostel proprietor strums the hostel's resident guitar.  The lighting is dim, the couches are black leather, and the walls are covered with random band posters, pictures of Nessie, and various flags.  It's perfect.  I'm going later to watch some local musicians perform, so I'm just relaxing until then.

Today was amazing.  I got up early, around 6:30, hoping to get in and out of the shower before anyone else.  My first realization of the day was unfortunate: I didn't have a towel, and reception didn't open until 9 for me to rent one.  And I wanted to be on a tour that left at 9:15.  Okaaaay, so no shower for me this morning...I felt kind of gross, but got over it.  The point of this kind of traveling is not cleanliness...right?

So I set off to find breakfast.  I'm not sure what I was thinking - what was going to be open at 7:30 in the morning??  Should have just slept in.  I finally found a little coffee/sandwich shop that was open and went in, hoping they also had breakfast.  I was thinking croissants, bagels...haha apparently that's not what the Scottish eat for breakfast.  My choices were bacon rolls, sausage rolls, bacon AND sausage rolls, egg rolls, or a full breakfast consisting of eggs, sausage and bacon.  Oh my.  So I went with the sausage roll and a cup of tea (hoping to wean myself off coffee)(it turned out to be a full pot).  It turned out to be basically a dinner roll, cut in half and slathered with butter, with two sausage links stuck between the halves.  Lol.  Whatever, it's breakfast.  So I ate it, and drank all my tea, and staggered off, still sleepy, into the still-waking city.  I took a really lovely walk on the path along the River Ness that runs through the middle of the city, and got back at a more reasonable hour.  So I went to the tourist info center and bought a ticket for a later tour (I realized the earlier one took you out to Loch Ness but not to the castle), and then wandered around into all the adorable little shops in the center of town.

After lunch and a shower (finally), I got on the bus for my tour.  A bus took us to Loch Ness, where we sailed around for half an hour to Urquhart (say Urcut, or Urcurt) Castle, an absolutely beautiful set of castle ruins.  The whole thing was absolutely incredible and I got a lot of great pictures.  The best part, though, was being on top of these ruins and looking around and suddenly going oh my gosh - I'm backpacking Europe.  Incredible.

Tomorrow I'm taking a bus up to Ullapool to do some hiking in the northern highlands.  I'm exhausted and not the cleanest thing in the world and really missing home/Wash U and kind of looking forward to having some routine in my life again, but I am having a truly incredible time and I absolutely can't complain.  So many stories.