Some of my favourite things

A few of my favourite things

Once we get past Edinburgh, Dave hits auto-pilot, after his many previous trips to Perth for work, and he regaled me with tales of those trips as we headed north from the bridge. We'd planned to break for lunch at the McDonalds in the outskirts of Perth and arrived at around 1pm to find, surprisingly, lots of school children in uniform; evidently not only not half-term up here, but not  Bank Holiday either. We've been here on most of our trips to Scotland, so it feels like the start of the holiday proper.

The rest of the drive was uneventful; we came off the A9 at Kingussie for our traditional stop and look at Ruthven Barracks. This involved me scrambling up and down the verge to try an get a decent photo. I'm always after good advice from Dave on how to compose landscape photos - I know some of the so-called rules, but never have a clear idea, when seeing somewhere beautiful, how to capture it best.

Ruthven Barracks

Having stopped briefly at the amazing ruins, we enjoyed the picturesque back roads past Insh and Inshriach and into Aviemore, and our destination.

We unpacked the car quickly, and then stocked up on provisions at Tesco and once we got back to the cottage, bumped into Paul and June (the owner of our holiday cottage and pretty much family - June is my brother's sister-in-law) and young Sandy. After a quick catch-up, we unloaded the shopping and headed out to reacquaint ourselves with the local area.

We drove up to the carpark of the Cairngorm visitor centre to take a lovely walk out along one of the mountain tracks in the lovely evening sunshine. Before we reached the carpark, we stopped to admire the view across the valley to the peaks further south, and heard a nearby ptarmigan. Didn't manage to see it unfortunately. 

Cairngorm visitor centre

One of a series of wonderful winter sports sculptures

 

Great views of the still snow-capped mountains from the path

After a lovely hour-long walk, with some more photography lessons on the way, we returned to the cottage for beans on toast, and broke open our DVD box set of Season 5 of Game of Thrones.

 Tuesday May 31st

When asked to plan one of my perfect days, there are two things that are almost essential - having breakfast at the wonderful Mountain Cafe in Aviemore, and visiting the Highland Wildlife Park. This, therefore, was always going to be a wonderful day. We left the house at 7.55 and walked into the village to await the opening of the ever-popular Mountain cafe. In previous years, we've had to queue up the back stairs until 8.30 (getting there early is often essential to ensure you get a table), as the cafe is situated above a mountain goods shop, but it appears the shop has started opening at 8.30 daily to allow the customers of the cafe to queue up the main stairs. As it happened, we were first there and got a table at the picture window. The food was as good as ever; Dave had French toast with fruit and bacon and the berriest smoothie I've ever seen. I treated myself to pancakes and bacon and fruit and a lovely coffee. It was truly gorgeous, and during breakfast we decided to spend the rest of the day at the wildlife park.

Dave's very berry smoothie in Mountain Cafe, Aviemore

Dave enjoying his Mountains Cafe breakfast.

We strolled back to the cottage and picked up the cameras and drove to Kincraig where the wildlife park opened at 10.30am. The day turned warm and sunny and, based on feeding times and talks, we decided to start by parking up and doing the walk round part of the park first. We enjoyed seeing all the usual animals and heard the talks on red pandas, Japanese macaques (snow monkeys) with several really young babies, lynx with cubs (extremely well hidden in the overgrown habitat of their cage), gorgeous Scottish wildcats, one male polar bear (Walker) and the rather shy snow leopards. 

Female red panda

Japanese macaque mum and baby

Japanese macaque acrobatically taking a drink

Japanese macaque

Beautiful Scottish wildcat

Walker, one of the male polar bears, having his lunch

After a patient wait, one of the snow leopards showed itself.
There was a suggestion the female was close to giving birth, hence their reluctance to appear, even for lunch.

We fitted in lunch between talks and feeding, but despite waiting for half an hour, didn't get to see the Amur Tigers being fed, which is usually a fabulous ferocious sight.

Enjoying the sun, this tiger wouldn't leave the outdoor enclosure,
making setting out the food tricky. 

We had a quick ice-cream in the sun, and then, belatedly headed off for the road-trip round the Main Reserve, seeing the bison, camels, elk and lots of lapwing and oystercatchers with their respective chicks.

Gorgeous oystercatcher

Bison

Lapwing and a flock of goslings

Redshank

Eurasian Elk

Eurasian Elk mum with her calves

Przewalski's Horses in the beautiful backdrop

Red deer in the park

Wolverine

Bactrian camel

We got back in time to hear the talk on the busy wolverines and just missed the chance to go round the reserve again by about 3 minutes. The only disappointment was the fact that the wolf wood was temporarily closed, and Dave wasn't able to see this favourite creature of his.

We had a quiet evening, bath, chicken salad and the next episode of Game of Thrones.

Wednesday June 1st

Appropriately for the new month, we'd arranged to meet up with June, to have coffee and cake at the wonderful Potting Shed tearoom at the garden centre in Inshriach. It opened at 10, so after breakfast we went for a quick walk round the Rothiemurchus Lodge end of Loch Morlich. The day started off grey, but had begun to brighten up when we got to the garden centre at 10 and met up with June.