Corinne CrawfordI spent the next day resting and working. To be honest, staying out past midnight does not suit me and I was feeling a bit sluggish. So I took the day to rest and work and to plan some things for after I leave Inverness. I had nothing arranged beyond the next 3 days so I had to figure something out. I had been thinking that after two months in the UK, I needed to head to a cheaper country. But I didn’t really know where. Plus I was definitely thinking of heading more south to get a little bit of warmer weather. I researched in circles, as I do, and finally decided to go to Sofia, Bulgaria. As I was looking into how to get there, I was running into stumbling blocks with the timing of getting to an appropriate airport by train. Turns out Saturday is the worst day to travel by train in the UK so I asked the hostel if possibly I could stay one more night so I could do a sleeper train the following day all the way to London to catch a cheap flight to Bulgaria. But the hostel was booked solid for the rest of the weekend because of the marathon in Inverness. The best price I could get for a flight was on Monday so I had to figure out where I was going to stay for two nights and how I was going to get to one of the London airports. I reached out to the host of the workaway I did in Edinburgh and asked if there was any possibility for me to stay just two nights at the bunker site in exchange for a couple of hours of work. He said to check with Sophie who had taken over the spreadsheet of available rooms that I created. I reached out and she did indeed have a bed for me so I booked a train to Edinburgh and would stay two nights there and then fly from Edinburgh to London and have a 4 hour wait until my flight to Sofia. I could have done a shorter layover of just under two hours but because I had to check in again I wasn’t sure I would have enough time to collect my checked bags and then re-check in and go through security to catch the next flight. 4 hours should give me enough time. I had already booked a little apartment in the city center of Sofia but they only had availability until the 8th so I will only be there for 6 days before having to figure out if I want to stay more time in Sofia or explore more of Bulgaria. I will figure that out once I arrive in the country.
I also spent some time figuring out what I wanted to do with the rest of my time in Inverness. Because of needing to work, I really could only dedicate one day to additional site seeing and because I like walking so much, I decided to do a combo of the Clava Cairns and the Culloden battlefield. If you have any knowledge of Scottish history, the Jacobite rebellion ending at the battle of Culloden is certainly something you have heard of. Or if you watch Outlander. In any event, I took a bus about 30 minutes out of town that dropped you off at the Culloden visitor center. The Clava Cairns are about a mile and a half from the battlefield. You can drive there but I obviously didn’t have a car so I walked the little country road to the ancient site. Most people were driving there as I did not see any other people making the walk like myself. It was a little windy but I was lucky it did not start raining until much later in the day. Clava Cairns is a historical site of stone circles and cairn burial chambers, what basically just looks like a pile of rocks. And if you continued walking down the road just a bit more, there was another set of them in the middle of a field. No one else seemed to be interested in the other site so I had the nice walk to myself to see another massive standing stone.
You can definitely see the influence that Outlander has had on tourism in Scotland. You can’t go very far without seeing some tour or location Outlander related. And yes, I did see some middle aged women taking pictures of each other with their hands on the ancient stones no doubt hoping to fall into the arms of a historic Scottish hunk.
After being awed by the ancient history of the Clava Cairns site, I retraced my route back to Culloden. You can just go to the field for free but if you want any sort of context or information, it is wise to pay for a visit to the Visitor Center and I even paid the extra £3 for a guided tour of the field. The tour guide was excellent. She was a great public speaker and outlined the battle and its implications in a clear and interesting manner. It really brought things to life. And death. You can still see the mounds of mass graves of the mostly Highlander fighters on the Jacobite side, about 1300 of them.
I had brought a sandwich and snacks with me and after the tour of the battlefield, I chilled out on a picnic table and ate my lunch while I waited for the bus to take me back into Inverness. I made some dinner at the hostel, worked for a bit, then went to bed relatively early. The next day I went to the library to work for a few hours, then packed up most of my things for my departure the following day. I decided to go out again for some live music on my last night. It was Friday night and it fit my pattern of trying to get in one last bit of local flavor on my last night. I popped into 4 different pubs, two with music, two just local haunts and had a nice time either chatting with locals or listening to great music and watching the dancing. I got back to my hostel before they lock the door at 11pm and went to sleep. Perhaps it was the late hour, perhaps it was the couple of drinks, but apparently I snored like a freight train that night and was told by another American in the room the following morning that the poor lady from Belgium in one of the bunks was basically cursing all night in French about my night noises that kept her awake. The previous evening there were two other ladies that snored pretty decently and my earplugs worked great. How embarrassing and now I was glad I was leaving.
The train to Edinburgh was so crowded that they even suspended what class of ticket you had so anyone could sit in any carriage no matter if you had a 1st or Standard class ticket. But it was still so crowded with bags filling the aisles. I did have a seat and the country side view from the train between Inverness and Edinburgh was beautiful. Rolling fields, stately manor houses and sheep. I was actually looking forward to seeing some of my fellow volunteers at the bunker in Edinburgh and one of them had already reached out to invite me to join them at a pub that evening in town.
I would work for a few hours the following day to earn my keep at the bunker site and hopefully even do a load of laundry before taking the bus to the airport on the Monday.
