Now – I know the first thing you will all say when you read this, and I entirely agree. Why jet off all the way to Australia when you live in a beautiful place like the Highlands of Scotland? Truth is, it’s not really a holiday at all – it’s a “duty”! visit to a young niece, whom we have never met, for her second birthday – she looks gorgeous from her photos. Worst part about it is, we have to go for at least 8 weeks! It hurts just thinking about all those unbroken blue skies.   

As we hate flying, we thought we would need to break the journey, so decided to stop for a few days in San Francisco!   

With our lack of practice at long haul flights, we realise we are bound to be jet lagged after the long flight to Australia, so we booked 4 weeks in Australia just to be sure we will be well over it before we have to return to Bonnie Scotland – good thinking you say – well here’s an even better, brilliant idea.

Given that we are bound to suffer badly from jet lag and forced to stay in Oz for 4 weeks, I just know I am going to get desperately home sick for Scotland, so came up with the idea to go to New Zealand – it’s just a short hop from Oz.  It’s just like home, so they tell us, so where better to go to try to alleviate the home sick blues for a week or three J  before flying home fresh !!

Now you must agree this is a stroke of genius to help us cope with the stress of having to visit the relatives down under !! and at least, now you will understand why we have been forced into taking so long over the visit!

The things we have to go through for the sake of family )

Below is 10 more things to do at Loch Ness and I promise you I will be participating in some of these activities in my dreams over the next few weeks.

Now, where did I put those sun gla…….?

51  Play 9 holes of golf on Aigas Golf Course near Beauly

52  Spend a morning shopping in the bustling village of Beauly

53  Enjoy the pleasures of real ale at the Benleva Hotel

54  Find the wall of the old fort at Fort Augustus

55  Climb Craigmonie Hill (150 metres!)

56  Visit ‘Bonnie’ the deer near Croachy

57  Take a drive from Inverfarigaig to Farr

58  Go horse riding along the shores of Loch Ness

59  Go cycling on the quiet south side of Loch Ness

60 Visit the Clog and Craft ship at Invermoriston 

 Hikers: eat bananas – but take your skins home

They take two years to biodegrade – and Scottish mountains are littered with them

(Taken from the Guardian)

I have climbed Ladhar Bheinn, one of Scotland’s finest peaks. The view was glorious. And I threw a banana skin at it. I have stood on the magnificent Aonach Eagach ridge and gazed down on Loch Achtriochtan. And I threw a banana skin at that, too.

In fact, there are few mountains in Scotland I haven’t thrown a banana skin on. Forget all those energy drinks: nothing gets you up a ben like a banana. What’s more, they come in handy biodegradable wrappers. So I’m practically doing the mountain a favour, feeding the eco-cycle of nature.

But apparently I’m not. The John Muir Trust, which protects many of Scotland’s wild places, has just given banana-skin chuckers a stern ticking off. The trust estimates that there are now 1,000 banana skins strewn across Ben Nevis. Walkers, it seems, don’t realise that it takes ages for a banana skin to degrade: two years, in fact.

This comes as a shock. I have tutted my way round the litter-strewn shores of Loch Lomond and chased Mars Bars wrappers grabbed by the wind. Now I find that I am part of a “significant minority, who are littering and spoiling the experience for everyone else”.

And it gets worse. According to Keep Scotland Beautiful, orange peel, another of my happily jettisoned waste products, is pretty bad too. Still, at least I’ve never left a glass bottle. They last 1 million years, apparently – though I wonder how they know.

A load of rot: how long your litter takes to biodegrade

Paper bag – 1 month

Apple core – 8 weeks

Orange peel and banana skins – 2 years

Cigarette end – 18 months to 500 years

Plastic bag – 10 to 20 years

A plastic bottle – 450 years

Chewing gum – 1 million years

From Keep Britain Tidy (keepbritaintidy,org)

I sometimes wonder, in our attempts to make a place better for our visitors, do we sometimes lose sight of just what it is that makes this part of Scotland so special.

For many of us, it’s not the polished picnic benches, it’s sitting on a rock on the riverbank. It’s not the expensive restaurant, its devouring a cheese and Branston sandwich on a hill trail, squinting to glimpse a wheeling buzzard quartering the distant hillside. Its the wide open spaces without a soul in sight and a deep breath of clean air. Its the sky at night without the light pollution.

At Destination Loch Ness we do spend a lot of time trying to improve all sorts of beauty spots and attractions to make your visits more memorable, but it’s the little things that happen along the way that makes our Highland days so special. I can sum it up by telling you about my experience today on the way to Inverness.

First, I had to wait for a family of roe deer to browse their way across our garden before going out to my car. Then, within a mile of home, I slowed down to let a family of pheasants amble across the road, and as I slowed, a beautiful red squirrel scampered up a roadside birch tree, mouth full of hazelnuts. Then, a half mile farther on, a buzzard sat on a roadside post, lazily watching me drive slowly past.

These magical times are what we all want for our visitors to see, and more… I for one, didn’t have the heart to tell the lady, so excitedly telling us she had seen a Scottish wildcat on the forest centre picnic table at Inverfarigaig, that it was actually the local forester’s tabby cat cleaning up the picnic morsels!

Who am I to destroy her magical moment with a bombshell ? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.  

 Continuing the series of Ideas for things to do at Loch Ness