Graber Neufeld in Africa: UK visit on the way home

Flying back from Africa, we took the opportunity to spend about 10 days in the UK, mostly in Scotland. More pics on a separate page.

First stop after landing at Heathrow was driving to Cambridge and finding a bookstore to buy a bird guidebook. Talk about culture shock, we have not been in a bookstore like that for a long time.

Continuing north, we stop at Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland

Walking Hadrian's wall

Farne Islands, a nesting colony for many seabirds

The main attraction - puffins!

Some other good birds to be seen, razorbills, kittiwakes, and guillemots

Can't go to Scotland without having haggis. The boys tried some for lunch in Edinburgh, and decided it was fine.

Start of our bike trip, in Oban on the western side of Scotland. We took the Caledonian trail for 4 days, going along the west coast, and across various lochs to Inverness on the east coast.

The scenery was of course amazing, including a good number of castles along the way.

Can't be in Scotland without rain, and indeed on our longest day biking we had rain all day. Fortunately the rain was at our back. Here we enjoy a break on one of the two ferries across a loch. We found out later the ferry hit a rock later that day, and so there is no longer a way to cross there!

And more rain... We camped 2 nights on the bike route, but by luck had booked a hostel room on the day we were biking through the rain.

The next morning was beautiful sun, and a great path along the canal connecting the lochs

Lots of wonderful views of the lochs along the path

Outside Fort Augustus was a long slog up a hill to high moorland with lakes. Again very beautiful, but quite an effort with loaded bikes.

Scotland has very open land laws, including the right to camp virtually anywhere. We found a great moss covered forest along the shore of Loch Ness and claimed a spot among the conifers for a night.