Cruise Day 25 - Invergordon, Scotland

Today we stopped at Invergordon. This is small town in northern Scotland, population around 4000, which has a deep sea port suitable for ships our size, and appears to be a maintenance port for oil drilling platforms.

We docked on an overcast day with no wind and very still water.

For most passengers on our cruise, the shore excursions are for places like Loch Ness, Eileen Donan Castle, Urquhart Castle, Inverness, various distilleries, all of which we've visited previously when we lived in Scotland. So we decided not to do any shore excursions, and instead just go for a walk around town.

Being in no hurry, we had breakfast on the ship, and then returned to our cabin to get ready to go ashore. Here's the view of the town and port from our balcony.

It was only a 10 minute walk to High Street which is where the shops are. There was a mix of supermarket, souvineer shops, coffee shops, and various others you would expect a small town to have.

Many of the buildings on intersections with side streets had murals painted on them, making the walk more interesting and bringing some colour to this otherwise quiet town. Here are a small section of them.

Inverness has a small museum, actually a naval museum, which I walked up to visit. It is small and most exhibits are based around the sinking of HMS Natal, a Royal Navy cruiser that sunk in 1915 near Inverness.

Next door, there was a craft fair being held inside Royal British Legion Scotland Invergordon Branch, which is the equivalent of the RSA in New Zealand.

Being a small town, it didn't take too long to look around, and we were back to the ship by lunch time, leaving plenty of time for a swim and relaxing afternoon.

The ship was about one hour late sailing, due to many excursions running late. I'd opted to stand at the sterm of the ship for sailing, so there was much banter with other passengers as the buses rolled in one by one.

Tomorrow we will visit Edinburgh, anchoring in the Firth of Forth.