Balmoral Bliss

Balmoral Castle - holiday home of Royal Family

Landrover tour into backblocks of estate

Purple heather is a sight to be seen

Jane is obsessed with the binoculars

This cabin was a gift from the King of Norway
 and my favourite in the middle of
nowhere a beautiful lake and veranda

The Tower

Looks like a fairy castle

One of the wide roads

Our base in Inverness

Inverness looking glorious in the sunshine

Up an at ‘em we have a 2-hour drive before we start today's main attraction. GPS says this way, no we want the A93, not 94, round and round, a shortcut through Old Scone and we are on our way. Driving along a narrow road, feel like we are doing well, or are we? The car now lost all power and says ‘System Fault’. What to do? Turn off and on, a few times and eventually, it comes back to life. That was a bit scary.

Onwards we go up, and up, and up. These mountains are big. We get to the top and there is a chairlift this must all be covered in snow in the winter. Fast forward two hours and we are here, cross the green bridge over the River Dee (made by Brunel) through the black gates and find the office.

Balmoral is the Scottish holiday home to the Royal Family, think stag hunts, bar-b-ques and an escape from work. We are here to do a safari tour. We meet our guide, John and he gets us plus 4 lovely Americans into the Land Rover, one of the fancy ones with leather seats and we are off to check out the estate. I feel like I am on an episode of the Leyland Brothers we are up and down and over dale, see all the cottages, visit a botthie (camping hut), do a photo shoot at the bridge to nowhere, use our binoculars to check out birds, a plover and grouse. What I like best is the purple heather against the grey of burnt heather and the Honka hut from the King of Norway. There is just so much peace and quiet out here, its quite different feel to our landscape, its enormous and seems to engulf you in a pleasing way.

Just on the last stretch, we see a Red deer doe, but no stags today. Apparently, the stags don't like the heat as it brings out the flies (millions of them) and they have gone to the peaks. Eventually, John deposits us back to the main house and we are back into tourist land and explore around the house, in the ballroom and through the exhibition. The bit I like here is the covers of the Queens Christmas Cards from 1952 to today. What a lot of changes in the years.

One final bit to visit the cute little dog's graveyard and now its time to hit the road for Inverness (with a detour to Ballater and Cathie Kirk). Its 27 degrees and they are doing sunburn warnings on radio apparently sunblock is getting sold out. The roads vary from narrow one lane to country road two lanes and eventually we make it to Inverness.

Just wow, our AirBnB is divine, all tartan and style!