NC500/Kally1000

Kally Adventures embarked on one hell of a road trip!

We took on the Northcoast 500 (NC500) and it became the Kally1000!

If you're here, you might be thinking about doing this road trip in the near future! Looking for some inspiration or perhaps curious about Scotland's answer to Route 66!

We did the majority of the official road trip, and took some detours along the way to see some incredible sights!

This article is going to have our route, and stops but I will link to other articles that have our stops in more details if people are interested in where we stayed and what we visited! Do your research and if you do plan on staying at campsites check ahead of time if you can book but or if you plan on wild-camping there are some great apps which I will state in an article.

The above is the official NC500 map, it does have some detours tourists like to take apart from Skye.

I have seen quite a few people when doing our research drive round Skye too but with already a packed itinerary and lack of annual leave days we decided that Skye would be another adventure!

Most people will say you can do the NC500 in 4 days, granted I presume that's mostly driving and very limited stops, so for us that wasn't what we were after! The minimum is 7 days, but there have been people who do it in 14 days! It is entirely up to yourself, planning on where you want to stop, stay and how much driving you want to do on each stretch!

Officially the NC500 starts and ends in Inverness and you go clockwise, however, we decided to start from Inverness and work our way anticlockwise and finish in Oban (I will go into detail for each place/day either in another article).

If you take any advice when planning your trip have a backup plan for where you plan on stopping/visiting as it's Scotland you can expect all seasons in one day so some places may not grant a visit or stay long so you might move on etc

There is a great North Coast 500 App you should download, it is free, and has stories you can download and listen to during your trip, lots of recommended pit stops as well as general information about the NC500.

As you can see the above was our original route plan, we did some last-minute changes so you will see our final mile count wasn't 941 but 994 lol but I will go into detail of each day so you can see where we went.

At the start, we knew roughly that we would want to travel East to West then we started doing our research to where we would want to visit en route. The most time-consuming part was actually trying to find places where we would stay over. Then it was what in the world do we need to pack??

We stayed at a hotel at the beginning, camped the NC500 (including one night of wild camping, our first ever) and stayed in an Air B&B the night before heading home.

I will also link other articles, when finished, of the stops and what we packed in detail.

This was the original plan, but we did have to change it last min a couple of times which will be explained in detail in other articles.

Day 1 - Glasgow > Inverness

Day 2 - Inverness > Dornoch

Day 3 - Dornoch > Dunnet Head

Day 4 - Dunnet Head > Durness

Day 5 - Durness > Shegra

Day 6 - Shegra > Garve

Day 7 - Garve > Lochcarron

Day 8 - Lochcarron > Fort William

Day 9 - Fort William > Glasgow

Below are the related articles to our NC500/Kally1000 trip we completed August 2020, including the notorious Bealach Na Bà (Applecross Pass).

Our daily itinerary, including any last-minute changes we made, where we stopped and where we stayed.

Most importantly what to pack! We chose to go in August 2020 as we already had annual leave booked off we thought we wouldn't let it go to waste and because of the pandemic we weren't going to go abroad, we could be pretty much self-contained.

To note it is also prime MIDGE season so knowing what to take for prevention and relief might be handy (I will explain if you're not aware lol).