Holiday Cottage, Inverness

It's surprising what you can pack in to a small i10 when you have to! My little car tootled up the A9 en route to Inverness with every indication that it was going on holiday too:-) We usually stop for lunch at House of Bruar, just past Pitlochry, but the car park was heaving so we went instead to The Watermill in Blair Atholl. Good choice, as their soup was delicious and their carrot cake in a class of its own!

As we always try to make the journey part of the holiday too, we stopped at Boat of Garten, just past Aviemore and were just in time to see the ospreys there changing shift and the female bringing a large trout for the two chicks. The siskins and finches on the window feeders were a delight too and not in the least put out by visitors inches away from them.

Our cottage for the next week is in a beautiful setting on a farm, with cows, sheep and horses and overlooking Inverness, the Moray Firth and the Kessock Bridge. There's even a little Welsh pony called Boxer in the paddock right behind the cottage, so I think I might have died and gone to heaven!