Loch Ness and John O'Groats

Today we made our way to the Loch Ness visitor centre. We stopped along the way for some photos of the famous loch, hoping to catch Nessie and left feeling ripped off. We have seen many TV shows on the Loch Ness monster and felt that the visitor centre would provide us with no new information, so we turned around and started our long drive north to John O’Groats. This would be our longest drive to date in the UK, 254km. Our route hugged the coast pretty much all the way north. We gassed up in Wick along the way and eventually the towns and cities started to become less frequent. When we finally arrived in John O’Groats, it was much, much smaller than we thought it would be. John O’Groats consisted of one street, a harbour, a restaurant/gift shop, tourist information, the campsite and a very small building that housed the ferry terminal. After we checked in at the campsite we took the ten steps over to the ferry terminal to purchase our tour tickets for the Orkney Islands. The tour cost us £40 each, which included the ferry there and back, and a guided bus tour. Since the ferry alone costs £26 round trip, this isn’t such a bad deal. The campsite is right on the water and given our location, Julie and I were hoping to get great sunset pictures. This didn’t happen though, as every single night the sun went to set, a set of clouds would cover it up. Oh, and we took this picture at 11:30pm.