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You are here: Home / Photo Blogging / On The Road / On the Road and In Your Backyard

On the Road and In Your Backyard

by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)|  January 9, 20185:00 am| 14 Comments

This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture

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On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.

From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.

Submit Your Photos

Good Morning All,

This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.

So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.

You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.

For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.

Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!

So, if things go as planned today, I’ll have some time tomorrow to share some about my mother and her impressive life. No promises – I’m finding out each day how I can’t plan too much as more things pop up that need attention.

Today, pictures from valued commenter maurinsky.

My husband and I took our two years delayed honeymoon in Scotland last month! We started in Edinburgh, then went to Glasgow, then to the Isle of Skye, and then we drove the North Coast 500, stayed two nights in an ecolodge in Cairngorms National Park, before heading back to Edinburgh. The people of Scotland were lovely – not a single person asked me about Donald Trump. (I’m Irish – I guarantee that would be the first question every single person would ask me!)

Here are some pics from our trip!

Edinburgh Castle at Night

This is a view of Edinburgh Castle from Waverly Station. It’s not actually night, though, it’s actually about 4 in the afternoon.

Lairg

This is my personal favorite picture I took. This was taken shortly after heading out from Ullapool on the NC500.

Rainbow

This picture was taken as we were leaving the Isle of Skye, where it basically was spitting rain during our waking hours. A day later, as we drove the NC500, we saw more rainbows than I can count, including a couple that just followed us around as we were driving (my husband took a fun video of one of those rainbows).

Cairngorms

We were staying on a campground called The Lazy Duck, which has 3 or 4 ecolodges on it. We stayed in one called the Lambing Bothy – the place is heated with a tiny wood stove, the water in the kitchen sink is collected rainwater, and the shower is a bucket into which you pour heated water mixed with rainwater. It’s also an outdoor shower. This woods is the view from the outhouse, which is the nicest outhouse I’ve ever used. I took this the morning we were leaving – the night before, I got up in the middle of the night to use the outhouse, and walked to the outhouse with my headlamp on. I looked out into the woods and saw a pair of eyes gleaming back at me. I did my business, came back out and looked into the woods, and there were 3 pairs of eyes gleaming back at me!

Lathemore

This is a view from our B&B in Lathemore – the water in the distance is the North Sea.

Glencoe

This is a photo from Glencoe, in the Highlands.

The Ceilidh Place

They say you should try new things on vacation, so I started my first bar tab of my life at the most interesting business I’ve ever been in, The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool. The Ceilidh Place is a restaurant, a bar, an art gallery, and a bookstore. They also lead hikes and other outdoor activities. My husband and I ducked in to check out the bookstore. They were having Hungarian Night, so the smells of Hungarian food drew us into the full restaurant – so we sat at the bar. The bartender gave us a couple of shots of some kind of Hungarian liqueur, and we bought a couple of books. Based on one of the books I bought (a book on Scottish mythological figures and folk stories), Charlie the bartender recommended another book called The Lost Words, which is gorgeously illustrated. He also suggested a couple of whiskeys a lightweight like me could enjoy.

 

Thank you so much maurinsky, do send us more when you can.

 

Travel safely everybody, and do share some stories in the comments, even if you’re joining the conversation late. Many folks confide that they go back and read old threads, one reason these are available on the Quick Links menu.

 

One again, to submit pictures: Use the Form or Send an Email

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Reader Interactions

14Comments

  1. 1.

    Sab

    January 9, 2018 at 5:19 am

    Maurinsky,
    Thank you so much. Those are lovely.

  2. 2.

    Quinerly

    January 9, 2018 at 6:08 am

    Beautiful! ??❤

  3. 3.

    debbie

    January 9, 2018 at 6:41 am

    Probably the wrong part of the country, but I can feel Heathcliff in every shot.

  4. 4.

    J R in WV

    January 9, 2018 at 6:53 am

    Looks like a great trip, great scenery, good people to not bother you about the giant lard Dump in the White House.

    The Ceilidh Place sounds like a good business plan – something for the locals, something for the tourists, food and drink and education. Most of us on vacation want to learn something new. See new things.

  5. 5.

    Victor Matheson, of the clan Mathesom

    January 9, 2018 at 6:55 am

    You can’t just show a picture of Glencoe and simply say it is in the Highlands! It is perhaps the most infamous site in Scotland, the location of the Glencoe Massacre. The dirty Campbells slaughtered the entire McDonald clan at the behest of the English while staying in Glencoe as guests of the McDonalds. The best pub in the town still has a sign over the bar stating that no Campbells will be served (and the sign is not a joke).

    Looks like a great trip.

  6. 6.

    arrieve

    January 9, 2018 at 8:34 am

    Wonderful pictures! Scotland is one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen — I’m hoping to go back next year to see the Outer Hebrides. But even in all that beauty, Glencoe stands out. And they do still tell you, quite seriously, that you can never trust a Campbell.

  7. 7.

    eclare

    January 9, 2018 at 9:14 am

    That sounds like a wonderful trip! Love the rainbow!

  8. 8.

    laura

    January 9, 2018 at 9:45 am

    @Victor Matheson, of the clan Mathesom: well, we still have the Campbell Apartment….
    https://www.thecampbellnyc.com/

  9. 9.

    laura

    January 9, 2018 at 9:47 am

    The photos are so beautiful and verdant. Thank you for sharing them.

  10. 10.

    Albatrossity

    January 9, 2018 at 9:48 am

    Gorgeous! We visited many of the same places in 2008, and I’d love to go back and explore Scotland again.

  11. 11.

    cosima

    January 9, 2018 at 10:39 am

    The Lazy Duck is about an hour from our house! You should have phoned! But really, Scotland is amazing, and we are so lucky to live here. Your west coast/Skye weather sounds quite like the weather that we had in August — a wee bit warmer then, maybe, but not much different — it rained & rained & rained, but we had beautiful rainbows. The girls swam in their wetsuits every chance they had.

    I’m glad you were able to visit this area. I don’t have a favourite part of Scotland, because it is all so beautiful, so my advice to anyone who visits is: stay longer than you think you should so that you have enough time to see a fair bit of what you want to see — you will not have close to enough time to see everything on your Scotland bucket list. In all of our years of living here I’ve still not made it to dozens of bucket list places.

  12. 12.

    maurinsky

    January 9, 2018 at 10:50 am

    We had two peak life experiences on this trip.

    1. We had dinner at Aizle in Edinburgh. Aizle has no menu, they have a board with a list of ingredients and you get a 5 course meal (we had ours with drink pairings, and it’s actually 7 courses if you add coffee, because you start with snacks and bread and butter). The dessert was the greatest dessert I’ve ever had, and it was made with carrots, sea buckthorn, unsweeted frozen Greek yogurt, and walnuts. HIGHLY RECOMMEND!

    2. While we at the Lazy Duck, we booked the wood-fired hot tub on the premises. It was cold out, but the sky was clear, and in the dark we had the most epic view of the stars as we relaxed in the hot water. It was magical.

    The decision to go to Scotland was impulsive (Norwegian Air had a $99 special flying out of local airport because they were brand new), but we had a full-year to plan for the trip. There was so much we didn’t see, though! I would go back in a heartbeat!

  13. 13.

    Denali

    January 9, 2018 at 10:52 am

    My best friend’s maiden name is Campbell. I shall have to mention this bit of history to her. Although she does not care for the Brits one bit.

    The Hungarian liquor was probably Tokai – wonderful stuff.

    Your favorite photo is amazing. Want to do a watercolor from it,

  14. 14.

    maurinsky

    January 9, 2018 at 12:07 pm

    @Denali:

    Feel free to paint it!

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