On Sunday David and I decided to drive to the very most Northern Part of the UK, to a place called John O Groats. From John O Groats, you can take a car ferry to places like: Belgium, Iceland and the various other smaller islands like the Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland. The drive up was 235 kms from Aviemore and the scenery varied quite a lot. I think I was expecting Scotland to be much more forested, but actually quite a lot of it is big bald looking hills covered in brown heather. On the drive up north we passed some very rugged scenic coastline when our road followed very close to the coast and it was really nice, there were paddocks of sheep and highland cattle grazing on green paddocks with huge cliffs down to the blue sea. We arrived at John O Groats at lunch time and there really isn't anything there much except for a few little shops, including an amazing souvenir shop that we thought would be a nightmare to do a stocktake in!! Anyway there was a public toilet there with a turnstile to go through where you had to pay 20 pence to use. There was an old lady sitting in an office in between the mens and the womens toilet and her job was to give customers change if you didn't have the correct 20p for the toilets!!! We only saw about a dozen or so people there for the whole time we were visiting and I thought this poor old lady must have had THE MOST boring job in the world!!! I don't think the local councils in Australia would employ someone for that job. A sign post at John O Groats said it was something like 11,212 miles to Canberra! We saw a car ferry come and go but apart from that and looking at the souvenir shops and taking the photo of us at the end of the UK there really wasn't anything to do. So we turned around and drove home, it was a nice drive saw a few oil wells out in the sea and a couple of wind turbines way out to see as well and a couple of castles perched on the coastline as well.
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