We took the train from Edinburgh to Aberdeen where we stayed for 2 nights. The hotel we stayed in was directly across the street from the train station, which made things convenient as the hotel stored our luggage until check-in while we went and got something to eat. By the time we checked-in and got settled it was too late in the day to really see much, so we walked around and took a few pictures. We did get to go in Provost Skeen's house, though we were unable to take pictures of the inside. We were slightly disappointed in that the interior had been turned into a museum of important Scots - contributions various Scots have made in the fields of medicine, the arts, etc. We had hoped that we would be given a history of the house. The second day was our only full day in Aberdeen and we walked to the beach, walked to a downtown park and saw the statue of William Wallace.
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| This was the Saint Mary of the Assumption Cathedral near our hotel in Aberdeen. We know nothing about this cathedral as we just walked past and snapped this quick picture. |
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| Provost Skeen's House as seen from the back. |
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| Provost Skeen's House as seen from the front. |
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| Aberdeen's Mercat Cross. |
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| A big sign that says "Aberdeen" in the same square as Mercat Cross. We thought it looked cool. |
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| Jeff on the sidewalk at Aberdeen Beach. |
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| A cool looking building we found on our walk through the city |
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| Another cool looking building - this has an old tower connected to a modern structure surrounding it. We were unable to determine why this old tower was connected to this modern structure. |
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| We never could find out what this was, a circular thing suspended in the air by wires and hanging over a grassy area of the park we walked through. Is it art? Is it something to make you go "hmm"? We're not sure. |
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| A piece of art in the park we dubbed The Bat Ball. |
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| This is the park where the circular thing was suspended and the Bat Ball resided in a corner. The park was pretty cool as it had stairs, but it also had a ramp that wound around up the hill which made the park accessible to people with disabilities. There were also benches scattered along the path. |
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| This is the statue of William Wallace at the top of the hill in the park. |
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| Umbrellas suspended from wires across a street & over a cafe. We're sure these have some sort of significance (other than the obvious), but we don't know what that may be. |
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| The ScotRail train that took us from Aberdeen to Inverness. |
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| Picture of offshore windmills in Aberdeen. Scotland has many windmills and is working to become more Green. |
We left Aberdeen by train and went to Inverness. We had to cut a day off our Inverness stay due to a glitch with the ferry we had to take to the Orkneys. We had less than 24 hours in the city and we arrived about 11am. We could not get our rental car until 3pm and couldn't check in to our B&B until 4pm. We stored our luggage at the train station and took a walk up the River Ness to an island. By the time we finished that we grabbed our luggage and walked to the car rental place, then drove to the B&B and then grabbed a bite to eat. We left Inverness early the next morning (about 7am) in order to catch the ferry to the Orkneys. We really regret that we didn't have more time in this beautiful city. We'll probably have to come back sometime.
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| Three churches and one of the walking bridges across the River Ness. |
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| The two of us along the River Ness. |
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| Another selfie of us along the River Ness. |
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| Our rental car - a Vauxhall Crossland. |
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| The view from the front window of our B&B |
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| Saint Mary Catholic Church down the street from our B&B |
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| Inverness Castle - it was closed temporarily for repairs so we couldn't have visited it even if we'd had the time! |
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| Looking upstream on the River Ness |
On our drive the next morning to the ferry we stopped to see the ruins of Castle Sinclair Girnigoe. It is listed on the world register of most endangered historical sites. The UK government is working to preserve this castle. Unfortunately, there were no signs telling us what parts of the castle we were looking at so we have no real information about it. It's still a pretty amazing structure.
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