Today is the day of big sales, when everyone "boxes" back up the Christmas gifts they don't want to return them. Instead of shopping, hwoever, we secured breakfast and then picked up our hired car.

So, yeah, I knew driving on the left would be weird, require some adjustment, and then would get better over time. The getting better over time part, I had that about right, but let me tell you, driving on the elft is werid nearly beyond description. Ten years of reflexes and instincts are all, suddenly, completely wrong. It was very lucky that we were given an automatic transmission because we had enough going on without worrying about shifting with our left hands.

I bought a SIM card for my mobile phone to make phone use cheaper and then we hightailed it out of the harrowing big city.

We began by heading for Perth and quickly found ourselves on motorway-class[1] roads, and they were relatively easy driving. As time passed, however, we had to progressively downgrade, first to a dual carriageway A-road and then to just a single carriageway.

By this time, night had fallen, and driving on wet, two-lane, country roads in the dark, in a foreign country, in areas where the National Speed Limit (70 mph) applied became somewhwat nerve-wracking. But then our saviour arrived! We came upon another motorist who we pegged as a recently landed tourist armed with a GPS because he drove badly and slowly (at times causing cars behind him to queue for half a mile), but in towns, he always negotiated the roundabouts expertly and always knew where he was going.

He eventually went a different direction, and we made the last part of our journey to Inverness at a more reasonable 60-65 mph. After some experimentation (turning down poorly signed streets), we finally made it to Bunillidh (meaning by the sea), our B&B for the evening.