Disappointment on the road to Loch Ness

St Andrews Cathedral

We journeyed further north through Scotland, away from bustling Edinburgh and into the wilderness. Along the way we stopped off at St Andrews, home of golf, the ruined St Andrews Cathedral and equally ruined St Andrews Castle.

Once again, we were given a generous amount of time to wander around a place where there really wasn't much to look at or do. Wandering through the cemetery and ruins of the cathedral was interesting, but if you weren't into golf, then that was about all the town had to offer, really.

What followed was a lengthy drive through the highlands, broken up by 1. a quick stop at the Spittal of Glenshee, an extraordinarily small 'hotel' in the middle of nowhere, where we were served soup and sandwiches for lunch, and 2. 'Braveheart' being played on the coach's DVD player for all to see. The scenery was nice and the movie highly disturbing.

At one point, as our coach had to cross a very small bridge over a stream, the vehicle kept stopping and jerking abruptly forwards. It turns out if our coach had been even a metre longer, we would have become stranded in the middle of the bridge, wheels off the ground and stuck like a beached whale. Needless to say we were all very relieved to make it successfully to the other side.

We also made a brief stop at the Glenlivet whisky distillery where we were given a tour of the place. I'm sure it was great for fans of whisky, but for those of us who aren't into alcohol that tastes like alcohol, it was a bit nauseating. The stench in one of the distillery rooms was repulsive and overpowering, like a lab room full of agar plates that had been left for months with their lids removed.

Finally, at the end of the day, we pulled into our next hotel in Drumnadrochit, near Loch Ness. I discovered I had absolutely no phone reception and we struggled to get wifi in the hotel. I've never felt more useless as when we had a Contiki trivia night that evening, where I barely knew an answer to a single question, and of course there wasn't a single science-based one at all.

Despite my desperate attempts at optimism, this was such a disappointing day. Every stop was fairly dull and the tour felt increasingly like we were kids on a school excursion. I also kept feeling like I was reverting more and more back to my old self: shy, awkward, extremely clumsy, self conscious and strange. All my confidence had been left behind in Europe and now I was stuck feeling miserable because my expectations had been set unrealistically high.