Carrbridge and Inverness

On Friday morning, we checked out of the hostel and drove into the mountain resort town of Aviemore. We stayed for only a few minutes—long enough to pop into the Tesco for some fruit, then kept going north to the village of Carrbridge. Here, we visited the Landmark Forest Adventure Park, which is a collection of treetop walkways and ropes courses for kids of all ages. We all started with the lowest course, which was only about 20 feet off the ground, but still involved putting on harnesses and carabiners, and working our way across 10-12 rope obstacles. Since there was a crowd of people moving through the course one after the other, we couldn’t go too quickly. We noticed that what often slowed us

down was a family ahead of us with two parents and two small children. Of course, it wasn’t the children who were causing the traffic jam—it was always the mother of the children who didn’t realize that she was terribly afraid of heights until she got up there. In one case, there was a little boy of about five who was almost pulling his mother through the course behind him, saying soothing words of encouragement to her as she felt her way through with her eyes squeezed shut tight. On our first trip through, David decided that he really wanted to test out the whole harness and carabiner contraption, so while we were all waiting on a tree platform for the mom-traffic to clear ahead of us, he jumped off the platform and dangled triumphantly for a while, to demonstrate his fearlessness. His act of bravery attracted a bit of attention from the spectators below, which was fine until he decided that he had been dangling long enough and it was time to get back up on the platform. Which he could not do, of course. He tried pulling with his arms, but he was too far below the platform for that to work, so he tried kicking with his legs, but there was a kid on the obstacle behind him so he

couldn’t use that part of the rope for his foot. So he dangled there for a moment like a piñata (and since the nuts and candies that he had in his pockets were raining down on the spectators below, he really WAS like a piñata!), and his audience was suddenly quite interested in his predicament, and increased in number! Finally, he convinced the kid behind him to move back far enough to allow him to use that length of rope to hoist himself back up on the platform. Once he got back up on the platform, Emma shook her head at him and said, “Well, Daddy, at least now you’ll make it into Mommy’s blog!” After that, he wasn’t quite as interested in having another go on the ropes courses, and let the three of us proceed while he went in search of some tea.

We stayed at the park through mid-afternoon, riding the roller coasters and the water slides that somehow didn’t get the riders wet (a good thing since it was at most 15 degrees celsius outside…), and letting the kids play on the huge slides at the front of the park while we drank cappuccino and tried to understand the Scottish conversations going on around us. When the kids tired of the slides and climbers, we got back in the car and drove towards Inverness. Along the way, we stopped at Bogbain Adventure Farm, where we rented a quad bike for the kids to ride. It was a small junior quad but they had a blast nonetheless once they got the hang of the throttle, and took turns driving around the dirt track. They had the place to themselves, which was a good thing since Emma couldn’t manage to keep the bike on the track and kept running over the tires that were bordering it. John did pretty well, though, except that he had to use both hands to push his thumb down on the throttle from time to time, meaning that we moved around the track in two speeds—fast and stop. Even I got a little motion-sick watching him!

By late afternoon, we made it to Inverness and parked the car, then walked along the river in

search of a spot for dinner. This can be tricky in Scotland, since restaurants seem to come in only a few varieties—the pub, the Indian restaurant, the high-end white-tablecloth place that serves a three-course dinner for upwards of £20 per person, or the grubby fish and chips and deep-fried-Mars-bar shops. We have had way too much Indian food recently to make the second one an option, and were generally adverse to the latter one. Travelling in Scotland can be frightfully expensive (even with the hostels) so we decided that the three-course dinner would be financially unwise and went with the pub. These can sometimes be tricky with kids because the rules on which kids can go in at what times of the day to which parts of the pub are a bit complicated—and often explained in an exceptionally heavy (i.e. unintelligible) Scottish accent. And though pubs are smoke-free, there’s always a small crowd of pub patrons chain-smoking just outside the front door, so one has to pass through a thick fog to even get into the place. But we picked one that seemed fairly kid friendly (despite the large hen party sitting just inside that were all wearing matching Playboy-bunny-ear headbands…), and were pleasantly surprised. I actually managed to order one of the very few Scottish meals that showed up without a side of chips and mushy peas (though the kids’ meals included both…and both remained untouched), and David’s chicken became palatable once he had coated it in brown sauce. Of course, it took us about two hours to eat, as is typical here, since it’s considered rude

for the waiter to place the bill on the table until you ask for it yet it’s also impossible to locate a waiter once your food has been served. So once we actually managed to flag a waiter down and pay for our meal, it was almost 9 o’clock at night, and we headed right to the hostel for the evening.