Scotland

With our four-month roadtrip through Scotland, our year-long journey across Great Britain came to an end.

After making our way from the south of England through Wales and the northern Lake District, we first settled in Edinburgh, just as autumn slowly began to sweep across the land. Scotland turned colorful, windy, and cold. After six weeks in the capital, we traveled through the Highlands up to Inverness, where we lived near Loch Ness and turned it into Tia’s daily swimming pool. Naturally, with evening stick-shaped dinosaur necks rising from the water in the last rays of light breaking through the clouds, it was easy to imagine how the myth of Nessie might have been born.

Due to the approaching winter, we decided at that time not to venture any further into the northwest, even though it is precisely there, along the North Coast 500, on the Scottish Hebrides and also on the Isle of Skye, that Scotland reveals its true wilderness and beauty, something we could only resist with great reason. That journey will be another one, with the great hope that Tia and Sandy will still be healthy and cheerful at our side when we experience it.

Scotland, like the whole of Great Britain, is an almost indescribable paradise for dogs and their human hiking companions. After all the years, countries, and adventures, hardly any other place deserves this title more than the great island in the far west of Europe. We were fortunate to stay as long as we wanted before Brexit finally came into force. And if Brexit had never happened, it might have been forever, for such freedom on foot, with a dog or on horseback, is almost impossible to find anywhere else in Europe.