Tag: planning

NC500 Day 2 – Itinerary

Hello and welcome back to the Scotland itinerary series. 

The most I can hope from these blogs is to help you have the most fantastic experience in Scotland and on the NC500 route. These blogs try to give you the much needed information for your trip without too many of my feelings and thoughts on each experience. Should you be needing more of a push to try these itineraries, the links to each day’s blogs will be linked below. 

As you may have seen from the itinerary from Day 1 (link below) we started our trip on the eastside of Scotland which is quite unusual as it approaches the NC500 in an anticlockwise manner. Most tips tell you to combat the route in a clockwise form, however as we had plans in Edinburgh and we had plans to finish in the Lake District this worked better for us. Mr W had also heard a tidbit about travelling anti-clockwise too. In all honesty, everything I heard prior to our trip suggested that the east coast of Scotland is vastly different to the western side. In a way I would agree, they are very different. However, in the opinions I read it became quite obvious that people favour the west coast of the Highlands which is a shame. The east has so much to offer and I found it was just the best build up to the rest of the journey. It gradually envelops you into the route. The villages are pretty and the coastline is easier to navigate on foot. 

So without much ado, let’s continue with the itinerary. This was one of the easiest days in terms of navigation.

Day 2 was such a beautiful day filled with wonderful activities to help you stretch those legs as you introduce yourself to Scotland.

We ate in our hotel room in order to save time and money. We used our pre-packed oats and our hotel had a kettle so this really helped us. 

Start your day as early as sunlight allows. The Old PackHorse Bridge needs at least the beginnings of sunlight to fully appreciate. We made sure to get here mega early so we were alone and there was just one other vehicle in the car park when we arrived. The walk to the bridge is along the main road in the town of Carrbridge. It was very easy and yet packed a punch for those early morning thrills. To get the best view of the bridge itself there is a wooden staircase just a few metres off of the current bridge. Please take care using these stairs, they can be extremely wet. 

From here we journeyed to the House of Bruar which stands in front of the pathway to the Falls of Bruar. Parking is free. There is much advice online to use the toilets in this establishment as they are rumoured to be the ‘poshest’ toilets in the highlands. I cannot confirm or deny this fact as we were quick to leave after spending a lot more time on the hike than we originally planned. There is advice online about the walk itself. It says to turn left as you approach the first bridge on this walk. One thing I can advise to the unsteady on their feet is to cross the bridge and take the walk up the hill on the right hand side of the river. It is a steep walk which I for one could only tackle uphill. If I were presented with that steepness on the descent I would not have been happy. We did the loop walk anticlockwise in its entirety and still got to see everything. The descent on the left hand side had long stretches of large rocks embedded in dryer earth to walk down. This is something for you to consider as you approach this walk. 

Something I do wish we had done is visit the House of Bruar which is a huge complex of shops with clothing, trinkets and even plants. It looked so decadent and by the time we had returned from the falls it was really filling up. Maybe add an hour onto your day and take time to look around? I also spied a coffee area which would be a welcome treat after your walk!

Having spent so long at the falls, we head straight to Clansman Harbour, Inverness for our Loch Ness Cruise. Our cruise time was at 2pm. There are other times for the cruises so you could potentially get a cruise at 4pm if this suits you better. We went with the 50 minute Clansman cruise which was perfect for us. If we had had the time, we would have approached Inverness via Fort Augustus to give us the perfect introduction to Loch Ness. By doing this you will drive from Fort Augustus up the left hand side of the Loch to Canmans Harbour and be able to peek out at the water as you go. 

Not usually one to jump on the typical tourism bandwagon the cruise was a welcome relief from walking and driving. When you think of Inverness and Scotland in particular you, or maybe just I, always think of Nessie. So I just had to include this on our trip. It was relatively cheap and, as expected, packed with tourists. We had no trouble getting a seat. The only trouble was the grey sky and the condensation on the inside of the windows. It meant we didn’t see much of the Loch itself and as it is a looping cruise, you see the same bits out and inwards. Would I do it again? No. Am I glad we did it? Yes. It feels like a rite of passage for sure. I have linked the website below for you to book your tickets. The car park for the harbour is located across the road so don’t let the location fool you. Try and arrive ahead of your journey time as there aren’t many car park spaces and there are lots of people arriving by coach. There is a walkway that gives you safe passage under the busy road to the harbour. This is conveniently located next to a large ‘Nessie’ statue at the far end of the car park. A large gift shop can also be found at this location. 

Be aware, there are not very many gift shops on the route and therefore you should buy any desired trinkets when you see them. Prices remained similar in the few shops I did see. For example, magnets were generally £2.50-3.99.

After our brief cruise we made our way to Plodda Falls, which was well signposted on the approach. There is a charge for the car park which is very reasonable. We found there were quite a few midges here so grab those midge nets or deet sprays. We didn’t fare too badly on this entire trip but it is always good to be prepared. The waterfall here is exceptional and the observation deck is NOT to be missed. There are two trails you can try. The white marked Plodda Falls Trail and the green marked Tweedmouth Trail. Somehow we started on the white trail and finished on the green trail. I know I know, we did not start very strong on our trial following. But there are no complaints about doing it this way. If you have time constraints, definitely do the first trail and if unsure, just retrace your steps. 

A perfect end to a fantastic day! We stayed in Strathpeffer and booked in for two nights for the next few days’ activities. (Review to be linked below soon!)

Oh and your car will be absolutely filthy from the dusty, single track road to Plodda. Sorry about that! The Scottish rain will soon sort it right out.

https://www.jacobite.co.uk/tours

https://frameworktravel.home.blog/2022/10/09/highlight-two-of-the-nc500-a-tall-observation/

NC500 Day 2 – Bruar, Loch Ness and Plodda Falls
NC500 Day 1 – Itinerary

Driving a wardrobe

Today Mr W got his first glimpse of the NC500 itinerary. 

We sat and scrolled through all of it together. I was so nervous. It’s 6 months in the making and lots and LOTS of research. Up until today I hadn’t even thought to check the word count. It comes in at a hefty 11,000 words. It finally feels finished now that my partner in crime has seen it. 

There are some checks to be made in terms of the postcodes for the hidden locations and truth be told I’m looking to use the ‘what 3 words’ app. This hones down an area by using three random words. And is accurate down to the last 3 metres squared. It’s already all done online, worldwide so I just have to put my brain into gear and spend a day sorting it. With over 80 locations and hotels it’ll be a feat of concentration for sure. A lot of the places we are visiting are described rather than having an address so this will cut a lot of time and guesswork out of the driving. As too many of the places don’t exactly have car parks and you need to rely on laybys we need to have our locations pretty spot on.

When it comes to car parks in general there’s no definitive information on some about payment etc. So it’s another thing to remember to carry a supply of change etc. 

We also discussed lots of ideas about how we will travel in terms of luggage. We’re pretty set on how the food supplies will work. We’ll have meals on the go in one box, snacks and drinks in two more and then the breakfasts and dinners in the back of the car so we can grab them for the evenings. We’ve decided to take one big piece of luggage for clothing such as trousers, tops etc and then a smaller bag for underwear and other small items. We can then compartmentalise the car, much like a wardrobe, and it’ll make grabbing what we need really easy. The idea behind all this planning and strategizing is minimising the amount of time we hunt through luggage and boxes for what we need. We want the car to be like our home on wheels. We have drawers at home for socks. So we will come up with a similar concept in the car. As we will be on the road, in-between hotels for 10-15 hours, we need to be able to cut down on the faffing about. So streamlining the process of reaching our hotel and checking in is really important to me. To check in with our valuables and an overnight bag is our plan. 

As Mr W proclaimed today, this kind of organising effort is right up my street so I’m not worried at all. There are going to be days that we’ll feel like zombies, but as my darling husband announced today, ‘this is an adventure’. And I simply cannot wait!

Oh and a little update on our pool-time extravaganza today. The sun didn’t emerge from the clouds until after 2pm and by that time it was hidden behind the huge trees behind our house. To say the water was cold is an understatement and after many huffs and puffs from me, we moved the pool to higher and hotter ground, it’s now ready for the summer festivities and I am ready for it! It is now also in a place that is not overlooked, which means I’ll be wearing a bikini for the first time in my life and owning every single second of it!

Planning the NC500 cont.

Well here we are, I have covid.

I ‘the ultra liable to get sick’ have managed for two and a half years to keep completely healthy and bam it’s got me!

So far it’s been body aches, night sweats and shivers, a running tap of a nose and loss of appetite. Oh, and the sore skin! Omgosh. My skin feels burned. 

But other than that I am lucky. Either without the jabs, now or back in 2020, or with a stronger strain perhaps, things could have been so different. 

I’m counting my lucky stars for sure. 

Sleeping hasbeen the main course of action. Yesterday I saw sunlight for 4 broken hours. Crazy. Today the aches are subsiding, the temperature is just hot hot hot and I’m not so tired. Ever the optimist, ha, I’m thinking this all means good. I’ve taken solace that I havent lost my sense of taste, albeit I’m not hungry but I’m guzzling down tea like never before and it does taste like tea so yippee!

You may have noticed my last few posts were rather abstract. With my fuzzy head I delved into my archive of writings and dug out what I could. It was that or mash my forehead on the keyboard and pray for something good to come out of it. I will let you decide if the route I chose was the best. 

So Scotland, there have been several updates to the plans which is great. It’s finally getting somewhere! We are no longer stuck in a rut and movement is being made.

Most of the hotels have now gotten back to me regarding the recycling emails I sent out, so that is a big weight off of my chest. I’ve compiled all the info (nerd) so I know how to plan for our sustainable rubbish collections as we go along. 

After trying to fit a whiskey distillery into our trip, Mr W decided it wasn’t worth all the detouring and squeezing of our timelines. So that is a rather big adjustment I don’t have to make. I don’t drink whiskey at all, Mr W would give it a go, but ultimately it is something you are told time and time again to do when you head to the highlands, so into the plans it went. Unfortunately the time we have in Skye was planned around one particular distillery, and when it came to booking, they are under refurbishment. There is SO much we want to do on the Isle of Skye that adjusting became such a nightmare. It was doable, by my standards at least, but it did mean another day of getting up at an ungodly hour. And quite frankly, if my stomach and gag reflex around whiskey is anything like it is around brandy, we could have been in a bit of a pickle. That pickle being a mound of pukey puke puke! So that’s another item… not ticked, but deleted off the to-do list. Which in a way has given us more time to wander around Portree harbour and we actually get time for a hot meal. I mean, hello!

Speaking of which, I finally remembered to call a restaurant to book us in for dinner the night before we arrive in Inverness. It is in a tiny town at the very top of the Cairngorms, and one of the last times we’ll eat hot food off of a plate. Sounds dramatic, but it is true. 

I’ve had a brief look into geocaching and nothing jumped out at me when I looked at the list. This may be something I come back to at a later date. Maybe. Probably one sleepless night. This is a possible ‘to be continued’ moment. 

I’ve also tried paying off our final accommodations and yet they are all pay on arrival, so that’s a note made on the itinerary. 

All rather boring stuff I’m afraid. I’ve even tried to book the very last thing on my list and the website is being refurbished, so I can’t! Ha! You cannot make it up.

Right now, I’m checking out locations on our route that can help us get some family tartan. That would be the only souvenir I plan to get on this whole trip, so I want to make sure that I pre-order it and that I don’t have to travel too far off of our route to get it. I have a few that I’ve found and will check them out soon.

All very thrilling stuff as I’m sure you can determine for yourself. For now, my head is getting fuzzy, my temperature is spiking and my final cup of tea of the day is calling. 

Well done to the people who have beaten me and still not caught covid. Thank you to the jabs for making sure I’m not suffering too badly. And praise the tea-god for they are all so powerful!

Planning for the NC500

It has been a while since I’ve given an update on the big trip coming up for us in late summer. As of midnight tonight, our mega busy month of June will be over and it is just as well as Mr W has caught covid. So this weekend of planned ‘time-out’ truly will be a stay at home event. No plans. No house stuff. Not even sharing a bed or a sofa at the moment with the fella so it is truly a time-out event. He actually seems okay at the moment which is a huge relief. So yes, June has been a tad mad. A weekend away in Norfolk. A long weekend in Northumberland. Family parties. Errands galore. Life. And finding time to run this house. But hey, we made it through!

And here we start the countdown to Scotland! The NC500 is calling and I cannot believe we are so close. The house is starting to look like a doomsdayers shelter with boxes piling high for all the food and supplies we are taking. The itinerary I have (so far) is crazy long and it is still not finished. 

Granted there are minor things left to be done now, a few payments, adjustments mainly to the Isle of Skye section and a couple of reservations to be made. Otherwise it’s the behind the scenes stuff. I need to get my organising head on and tackle all the food boxes. I really do not want to spend my days digging through boxes of food to find a meal. So I want our car to be like a pantry, all food that will be eaten in the car, will be in one or two boxes in the rear footwells. This goes for the travel water bottles, drinks, kettle etc. Food in the back of the car will be for meals in the evenings and mornings, so ideally easy to grab as we arrive at hotels along with our essentials such as clothing and toiletries. 

We need an easy system for our clothing so we don’t have to haul our luggage out every night. We have 12 hotels in 14 days, that’s a lot of hauling! 

It feels like the car is basically going to be a home on wheels for 15 days without the bed. 

I’d also like to sort out some kind of bin system for while we are between hotels so we’re not mixing up recyclables with rubbish. Today, I spent some time contacting all of our hotels and I have to say it’s been an unexpected surprise. I’ve heard back from 8 or so, so far, and they have all been super friendly and understanding of our mission to be sustainable while on our trip. A few have said they pick through the bins from the guest rooms themselves and divide up the rubbish. Where I commend this, I couldn’t necessarily let someone do this on our behalf. So I’m aiming to use sustainable brown paper bags to put our recyclable waste into and our hopefully very minimal rubbish will be binned in the hotel as provided. If I manage to find the time, I want to find some recycling points along the route too. It just takes the pressure off of us emptying the car at the end of the day. This gives our sustainable mission every opportunity to be fulfilled and definitely makes all the planning worthwhile. 

In the ‘Sustainability on a budget’ and ‘Out of body experience’ blogs from April and May (links below), I spoke about how we had been testing out the idea of tinned food and it’s proved quite successful. All tins but the ravioli and meatballs were really tasty, packed with the protein we’ll need and give us a much needed break from oatmeal and noodles. It’s also saving us a tonne of money. Usually when we go away we can spend anything between £10 on a budget sandwich or £40 for a meal out. These tins and a few crackers are going to cost between £0.90-£2.00 for each of us and where we’ll be in the car constantly or walking it is the most logical way of eating. There are also very few restaurants on the West side of the highlands so this really is a win-win situation. 

Recyclable. Tick. 

Budget friendly. Tick.

Longlife storage. Tick. 

Tasty. Tick.

Sustainability on a budget
Out of body experience number 342

Something I’ve realised from our Northumberland trip is how much space we will be working with in our car. Four of us squeezed into the car for a four day trip. Which is insane, as the two of us need to fit all of our stuff for 15 days! That’s food, luggage, photography equipment and blogging necessities. Next on my to-do list is finding a laundrette so we can take a week’s worth of clothing to cut down on the space our luggage takes up. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of possibilities to wear the same trousers for a few days in a row or I’m sure Mr W could do the ol’ underwear flip, but the fact remains, we need to wash our clothes. So far I’ve found one laundrette and it’s on a really busy day for us that we’ll be in that area. I’m sure I’ll find one. My initial search was made when I was fighting to stay awake, one eye open and drained by hayfever. There’s a good chance my brain wasn’t functioning at full capacity!

Little triumphs like the bladder bags and kettle have arrived since I last wrote about this trip. And they have been trialled and tested. They’re not too shabby to be fair and I’m convinced after our water intake in Northumberland that our two 5 litre bottles, that we use for our main water supply on a day to day basis, will save our bacon when it comes to hydration and budget. They will be the only plastic bottles on our trip and the fact that we have been using them for over 2 years makes me really happy. Eco-warrior or eco-geek? 

Mr W also found a bargain the other day that he is rather proud of. A pair of work out leggings? Like the gym ones? I have no idea what they are called. But basically they’ll be worn under his trousers and act like thermal/longjohn type things. He’s very pleased with himself. 

He also *drum roll* bought our first fully capable drone and I’m sure once covid has left this household we’ll be doing lots of test flights. It is a smaller model which means we don’t have to apply for a special incense but we do have to register it. I am really excited about this part of the planning as all you ever see with Scotand are aerial shots and I want to see it from land and air. So I am raring to go!

There is one more thing I’m tempted to add into this trip and that is geocaching. I don’t want it to add any locations to our already bursting itinerary but if there are any geocaches in the places we’ll be going that will certainly make things more interesting. Solving some puzzles along the way will make the long walks just that bit more entertaining I think and it’s also so great to be a part of the journey of others by writing in those little logbooks. This will be one of the last things I look into but I hope we can join in wherever possible. Mr W introduced me to it back in 2013 and I really enjoyed the problem solving part of it all. So as long as it’s fun I don’t see the harm in adding it to this powerhouse of a trip.

One thing that hasn’t worked well, and this is me being totally transparent because you have to be honest about these things, is the ponchos we bought on ebay. They can be used as a ground sheet, strung up to make a temporary shelter or worn to keep dry while walking. They have a hood with a drawstring and are ENORMOUS. Absolutely perfect for covering our backpacks and most of our bodies should we get caught out, which is most likely going to happen, on one of our big walks. Unfortunately, while walking in Kielder this past weekend, nature called and demanded the ponchos be worn. After a 25 minute walk my clothes underneath became a little soggy. My chest, arms and the top of my back were damp on our return to the car and this does not bode well when considering we may be walking in rain for over four hours if we are very unlucky. It’s not so much back to the drawing board on this but a fail-safe backup may be needed. I’m thinking, extremely sturdy umbrellas AND ponchos. This is all to avoid paying the extortionate amounts of money for completely waterproof coats and trousers and using what we have instead. Something we cannot risk, me particularly, is sitting in damp clothes. Especially on my chest. I get ill really easily with colds and chest infections and it may stop the trip in its tracks. So we plan, plan, plan to stop this happening!

My what a lot to do in such a short amount of time. I’ll spend more time as we move closer to the departure date detailing some of the tips I have for the hurdles we’ve come up against and any other purchases we make to help us out. 

For now, night night!