We have been on the road for 2 weeks now, so we think it is time we got cleaned up a bit.  We have gathered the dirty laundry and googled “laundry”.  Along the route we are taking there doesn’t seem to be anything available.  There is a place in Thurso which is about 15 minutes to the west.  We decide to go, do the laundry and then head east again.  We find the laundry.  It is a very busy place, doing laundry for B&Bs and small hotels.  There are bags and bags stacked up every where.  We can either do it ourselves which will be faster, or let them do it.  We opt to do it ourselves.  Weird, but all we do is load the dirties into the washer.  The lady adds the soap, turns it on and says to come back in an hour.

We go for a walk in the town of Thurso.  It is quite a quaint town.  There is a route called the North Coast 500.  We didn’t know about it until we seemed to be travelling some of it.  One of these MX5’s has a sign with “Scottish 500” on it.  This is a fairly recent tourism initiative to bring people to the north of Scotland.  It seems to be working as accommodation in the north right now is very hard to come by.

We stop in a grocery store to pick up toothpaste and fixings for lunch, oh yeah a bottle of wine.  This store arranges the wine like this.

After an hour we arrive to find our laundry washed, dried and folded!!  We did that ourselves  🙂 !!

We stop along the way at the Castle of Mey.  This castle was purchased by The Queen Mom after her husband King George the VI passed away.  She spent a lot of time here in Scotland.  We took the tour of the castle.  It was very interesting.  It sounds like the Queen Mom was quite a character.  There is a walled garden at the castle with lots of amazing plants.  They sell some of the veggies in the gift shop as well as using them in the dishes they have in the Tea Room.

We leave the castle and head to a village called John O’Groats.   We have heard of this place many times on this trip.  We didn’t know what the significance was.  The name is quite intriguing to  me.  There are a couple of theories on the name.  One is that man nameivd Jan de Groot, a Dutchman ran a ferry from here to Orkney and that he charged one groat for passage on the ferry.  The other is that is derives from “de groot” meaning “the large”.  It is also the northern most inhabited British point on the mainland, the southern most being Land’s End.

We arrive at our destination for today, a town called Tain.  We have a reservation at the Royal Hotel.   It is very old and I need to find out more about it’s history.  We have a room (not a large room) on the 3rd floor.

We are here for 2 nights so will get more details tomorrow.

Had a fabulous dinner tonight.  We sat next to a group of Americans on a golf holiday.  Very nice chatting with them.  They have played 5 rounds of golf in that past 2 weeks.  Lugging their clubs.  Not traveling light we think.

We think a whiskey distillery will be happening tomorrow.  Glenmorangie is close by.  The morning will tell.