Million Air Winter 2023/24

elite traveler WINTER 2023/24 157

Camusdarach Beach

We are not, by any means, reinventing the wheel (pun intended) when we suggest a road trip through Scotland. In fact, few visitors travel to the fabled, mythical nation with intentions of anything but navigating through its winding tracks, fl anked by towering mountains, glassy lochs and wild oceans. However, the beauty of Scotland’s roads is, in short, how many there are. You could return year after year and discover new routes and landscapes unfurling before you — as well as plenty more wonderful places to stay along the way. Then, of course, there’s deciding when to visit. Fools might tell you that summer is when you’ll catch the best of Scotland’s famously unpredictable weather, but I am here to fl y the fl ag for fall. Yes, the gamble for sunshine might be greater, but it is during the later months of the year that the Scottish landscape becomes its most brilliant, when the green of the high season twists into a deep coppery auburn and when, if you’re lucky, a smattering of snow sits on the mountaintops. Also, those rarer fl ashes of blue sky feel sweeter when they follow a dramatic downpour. It is actually fortunate, despite what I might have muttered to myself as I marched across a beach during a particularly heavy burst of rain, that Scotland doesn’t have a more reliable climate — otherwise, everyone would be here all year round. We’re starting at Inverness, an industrial city on the east coast, loosely considered the capital of the Highlands. While most would use the metropolis as the starting point for the NC500 route — a road trip that winds its way around Scotland’s most northerly points — we’re slicing the countryside in two and heading due west to The Scotland’s road well-traveled

The Torridon

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