Sept 13/11

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Today we headed for the Isle of Skye. The trip there was amazing. From the bus you’re looking up 3-4000 feet to the top of a mountain covered in great foliage, when you round another corner and there’s one even taller. It was still raining so where there is a little crevice in the face of the mountain, today it was a white streak following gravity downward. Where these cracks come together to form a river you usually see a bridge across it somewhere. The bridges, like everything are made from stone and mortar and are almost always in the shape of an arch where it allows the river to flow underneath. Sheep farming is very prevalent in the Highlands and where you see a farm the sheep are usually kept in with a stone fence. Even when they’re in a dilapidated state stone fences have a timeless quality to them. On the Isle of Skye we took a tour through a castle built in the 1200’s called the Eilean Donan castle. It’s the most photographed castle in Scotland, so, we took a couple of pictures ourselves. It was blown up like most castles, but in the early 1900’s a cousin of the original owners took it over and rebuilt it as original. Today it gets used for weddings and such and is in excellent condition. After that we were dropped off in Portree to have lunch. We sat down in what looked like a very nice restaurant and checked the prices. I had my coat back on before the menu hit the table and we went uptown to a little Hotel restaurant. We bought a club sandwich and a carrot and orange soup and shared them. It was very good and much more affordable. We headed back off the Isle of Skye then and when we were along Loch Ness we actually saw Nessie and took a picture of her quickly before she submerged. Then we streaked back to the hotel in Inverness and they dropped us off downtown for supper. We walked down the street they dropped us off at as far as we could go and went into the restaurant on the right. We shared a tomato and basil soup and a chicken stir fry main course. This was the best meal so far and with wine probably the cheapest. We tried to do a couple of geocaches in the area, but a combination of using our new uk gps because our handhelds batteries were dead and some mixed up hints caused us to not find one out of 3. Now drinking cheap wine and crisps.

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