Isle of Skye - Day 2

Monday, 16 September 2019

It was a great night sleep in the pod.  So quiet and peaceful up here.

Today is another day of a looping drive - Trotternish Peninsula on the Isle of Skye - along with a couple hikes, maybe a castle, a brewery, and ending with a town walk.  More sunshine and rain, all mixed up weather again.

The first hike, up to the Old Man of Storr, 2 1/2 hour round-trip and around 850 feet up.  People coming down were fairly wet, but we started up without rain.  Up, up, up, through the mud we go a sloshing.

The views start a happening right away.  We've come up that ribbon of easy crushed stone trail, but now we're rock hopping in the mud again.

The Old Man looms above us - 160 feet of rock that had slid off from higher up and now rests here.

At the top, at least our top, and the one Gerri claims Rick Steves says is the top of this particular hike.  The "Needle" stands behind us.

Returning down, the rain is coming down again.  See the Old Man and the Needle prominently above us.

Like a curtain dropping on a stage, the mist is coming down.

We continued driving along and caught more views like this.  Somehow we missed the turn-off to the next hike, but with the rain, and the last strenuous hike to the Old Man, we weren't too disappointed.

We found the brewery, we weren't going to miss this stop, in the village of Uig.  They're working on completing a tasting room, so for us they said to goto a local hotel/restaurant to sample their brews.

And now some Haggis for Gerri - vegetarian of course - she found it better than surprisingly ok.

This is the view out the window from our lunch table - watching the rain from warm and dry quarters.

Rick Steves more or less says, just past this restaurant, turn sharp left, trust me, go about 2 miles, and you'll emerge into an otherworldly land of fairies:

Hmmmm, maybe Tim has scared them all away.  Or, as Rick suggests, all those sheep are actually fairies when out of view of humans.

A fairy at the top of yonder summit?

A fairy grabbing his crossbow...no, just a tourist dude.

Fairy hillocks all around, but nary a fairy to be found :(

Continuing our looping drive - and still opposite Uig, the spot of Skye Brewery.

Closing the driving loop, we return to the village of Portree.  Rick says:  "Skye is the most visited tourist area in Scotland, with Portree as its largest town".  The island has 10,000 people, Portree with 3,000, and many many B&Bs and other tourist dwellings.

A wooden fishing vessel nicely maintained and working hard most everyday.

Homes and businesses overlooking the harbor.

Great views from higher up, from a park overlooking the harbor.

One fishing boat in blue, one in red...

So many stories from the past here, we can only imagine, but we'll never know, unless we moved here...

This large fella seemed to understand all the tourists, got out of the way in short order before any confusion could take hold.  We wound our way back to our tiny pod house.

Tomorrow we leave Skye, and drive 200 miles of twisting, and often narrow, roads north.