Celebrating Summer
Last week Pedro finished his finals and was in the mood to celebrate. We had a little dinner with his friends at West End on the last day of finals, where they all decompressed and shared their own horror stories from individual evaluations.
When the weekend came, I knew he was itching to get a taste of his new found freedom and get out to explore. He hopped on google maps and went to looking for attractions near us. What he found was definitely worth it - Blairskaith Linn was less than 20 minutes away and promised a short walk to beautiful waterfalls and caves.
We had a decent enough day for exploring, which meant it wasn't freezing or raining. And from what we could tell from google reviews (always helpful), there were two waterfalls very close to each other. We found the first one easy enough since we could hear it as soon as we walked down the path. It was small, only about 4ft tall, emptying into a small pool that then trickled down the way towards the bigger one.
We spent a lot of time here, and luckily there weren't a lot of others around so we took the rare opportunity to take our sweet time. Pedro set up the tripod to line up his perfect photo, I was somewhat climbing down into the water to get my shots; we were all over the place. But it was nice not to have to worry about a bunch of other people waiting to get their own photo or being in their photos and vice versa.
After probably an hour of going all over and just enjoying our little photography hobby, a group of guys just down the trail called to us.
"Yous know there a bigger waterfall just down there? It's straight down and to the right, there's a cave too." Very helpful, probably thought we were wasting precious time on the mini waterfall with the main attraction just around the corner. We thanked them and waited until we got all the pictures we wanted, then headed down the path as directed. They were sitting around their campsite (a bit drunk, but hey it's Summer) and talked with us a bit about exploring Scotland. They were from England on holiday trekking through the lowlands and up to the highlands. Pedro explained we were from The States; him originally from Cuba and me from Florida.
"Yeah that's sounds right. You've got that twang!" Well that's the first I've heard of that here. He eyed us with all of our equipment, and asked, "Yous have a drone? You look like a guy that would climb a mountain with a drone,"
P: "I wish!"
Me: *taking a mental note for Christmas*
After we said our thanks and exchanged goodbyes, we descended (carefully) down the muddy path and came upon the Blairskaith Waterfall and Linn Caves. This site was also devoid of people, which prompted us to do a little happy dance and then start setting up for our photos. (Mind you, I probably took about 165 photos all together and only picked out and edited 16, the rest were simply extras just because.)
The waterfall wasn't too big and water below wasn't too deep that we couldn't walk right up to it and under it. This made it really easy to walk around everywhere and see it from all angles.
I'll be honest, I was not to sure about the cave part. We had seen in the Google reviews, that people had gone into the cave part to go around a large rock next to the water to end up right under the waterfall. Of course, the entrance to the caves looks quite open and easy enough to maneuver, but up close I thought the dark depths looked very ominous. I made the quick decision though to go in and explore.
