I love planning road trips, the routes, the hotels, and the places of interest along the way. If there is one place on Earth that lends itself perfectly to the road trip, it is Scotland with its numerous routes to choose from that take you through some spectacular scenery, and I live in Switzerland, so my standards are high!
I decided to go in an anti-clockwise loop, starting in Edinburgh and working my way up the east coast to Lochness, then over to the Isle of Skye and back down to Edinburgh via Oban. Everything was calculated to maximize the time to see as much as I could, so a timepiece was an essential piece of kit and so was a quality camera. And as I love efficiency, I called the lovely people at Leica who were able to provide me with some serious travel gear in the form of their ZM 2 GMT timepiece and Q2 camera. Never had I been more excited to get underway!
The Leica ZM 2
Leica Camera AG is a world-famous manufacturer of cameras and optics that is revered by photographers the world over. In 2022, the company decided to branch out into the world of watches, taking design elements from the cameras to incorporate them into the watches in a subtle and purist way. It all started with the Leica Watches L1 and L2, which then evolved into the ZM 1 and ZM 2.
The ZM 2 has a German industrial design feel to it and has been designed to look and feel like the company’s famous cameras, which makes it quite different from other watches on the market. If you turn the watch on its side, the pushers have been designed to look like the buttons on a camera as you look down at it from the top. The sapphire crystal is also slightly domed, much like a camera lens, and the crown is decorated with Leica’s signature red dot.
It is not only the aesthetics that are interesting, the crown can be pushed once to stop the movement – while instantaneously resetting the seconds to zero – so that the time can be set with the highest precision. Another push and the movement starts again. A little circular window by the three o’clock hour marker turns white when the movement is operating, and red when it is stopped. A second pusher at two o’clock changes the date, while the four o’clock crown sets the GMT function via a turning inner bezel. There is also a day/night indicator just below the white/red circle and a power reserve display (60 hours) at nine o’clock, which is modelled after an old camera light metre to look like closing shutter blades.
The manual movement is also of particular note as its decoration is more in line with Leica’s minimalist style than a traditional Swiss calibre. You won’t find any Côtes de Genève, circular graining, or blued screws here!
Back to Scotland
So, back to the road trip, I snapped on my ZM 2 and started the drive towards Inverness and the famous Lochness. Arriving as the sun was starting to set, I decided a cold water swim would be quite fun, although, at five degrees, the water was glacial. I met a couple of local women in wetsuits (that’s cheating in my opinion), who claimed to have seen the monster on several occasions. The latest scientific research has found a huge amount of eel DNA in the water, so maybe they did see something.
Isle of Skye
From Lochness, I venture westwards to the Isle of Skye and the little town of Portree with its coloured houses. I start to get a handle on the Leica Q2, which is the perfect compact camera for watch lovers with both its landscape and macro modes. It was like this camera had been made for travelling watch enthusiasts! It has a 28mm fixed lens, 47 megapixels, and functions particularly well in low light, and has a super cool cropping feature. The macro mode allowed me to get up close to the ZM 2, which delivered some amazing watch shots.
Made for the Road Trip
The nice thing about doing a road trip in Scotland is that nothing is really that far apart, the most time you are going to spend in the car is three hours a day, and even that is a joy as the scenery is stunning and constantly changing. We pass lochs, rivers, dramatic coastlines, craggy mountains covered in yellow heather, as well as castles and ruins that constantly begged me to stop. Luckily, I had the Q2 to document the journey, and the ZM 2 to remind me to keep going if I wanted to arrive in time for dinner. I couldn’t have dreamed of better travel companions.
