Said crisis is why I didn't blog last night. It is also impossible for me to do anything more about it until 9:00 this morning (it is 7:32 right now), so I will fill the time with a little blogging.
We drove for nine hours yesterday. But we made several fun stops in the middle, so it wasn't terrible. Plus we watched How To Train Your Dragon for the first two hours, which is a solid start to any road trip, but especially to one through Scotland.
Scotland is beautiful. I've said that about every place I've been, but I think I really love Scotland the most. It's a lot of stone and deep hues like evergreen and navy and black. What a drive! There was always something to look at, so we were never bored. I had fun watching the plants and trying to figure out which ones were heather. I still don't know! I should probably look it up.
Now for the ridiculous things! The second one is really cool, but the first is not: I had to pay to use a bathroom yesterday. Europe is big on conservation and maybe they really do need to conserve water and paper with how little space they have for so many people, but come on. You can't help having to go to the bathroom. It's cruel and unusual to force someone to hold it just because they don't have any spare change on them. I wonder if they'd prefer it if people did what they do in Paris and just go to the bathroom wherever they like, such as in the metro, simply because they don't want to pay. I'm told that Paris smells really bad.
But that's my personal feeling on the matter. On to the other cool thing: we were at the head of Loch Ness at the time! We drove all the way around Loch Ness and got out of the coach in a couple of places to take pictures. No sign of Nessie, but supposedly it has to be hot and sunny for her to show up. I got to touch the water in one spot and it's really cold.
Have some facts about Loch Ness that our coach driver told us:
It's the biggest lake in Great Britain. It's not very wide, but it's about 23 miles long and really deep. All the other lakes in GB could fit inside of it. After about five meters, the water turns pitch black because of all the silt that comes in from the seven rivers that empty into it, so you can't see anything below those five meters. Very recently they discovered a huge cavern underneath Loch Ness that runs the entire length of the Loch. (Convenient, no? This is where they think whatever's down there has been hiding.) For the size of the loch and the volume of the water it holds, the number of fish that live in it is ssignificantly lower than it should be. I don't know if that's related to the level of silt in the water or if it means something's eating all the fish (which is what the locals want you to believe). And finally, they have a series of gates in one of the rivers that allow them to get boats into and out of the loch by controlling the level of the water between each gate. in 1967, the gate closest to Loch Ness was damaged by something underwater overnight.
They think that whatever is down there is around 100 meters long, but they've never gotten a clear look at it, so there's no real way of knowing. What do I think? Well, I know one theory is that they found a colony of giant squid living in Loch Ness a few years back. On hot days they come up to the surface and sometimes even break it with their tentacles, looking suspiciously like the head and neck of a large underwater dinosaur. But considering our lack of knowledge when it comes to what lives in the deepest parts of the ocean, I would like to think that there could be something there that we don't know about yet. Still, there's no doubt that most of the hype has been just that: hype, made up by people who want to believe. Or get attention.
Anyway, Loch Ness was amazing! I had a lot of fun and took lots of pictures.
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