Touching the Ocean, Seafood, and Folk Music.

Monday we had finally shaken off our jetlag and woke up around 7:30 local time, which meant we could have a nice breakfast before another morning of work.  We had some technological challenges presented by the Airbnb's DSL connection, which is a bit too unstable for our work.  Thankfully we figured out that T-mobile was able to provide a not-too-expensive stopgap, so we'll be using that for the next couple of days.

I polished up the drafts managed to get pictures transferred over from my camera and tomorrow I'll take a bit of time and extract the ones that accompany these entries.

After lunch, we rolled down the coast a bit and went for a couple of short explorations.

First to the Staffin beach so we could touch the ocean (somehow on Rachel's last visit to Scotland she'd never touched the Atlantic?  Shameful.)

It's the Atlantic!  (and at this latitude, it's cold!)

While there, we also got to see a couple of dinosaur footprints, which was pretty cool!

We then went on a small a hike along a path towards "Brother's point" with the rest of our early afternoon, which led us through a sheep farm and along some of eastern coastline of the island.

There are sheep everywhere on Skye, and they're constantly escaping their confines and wandering along the roadside.  "Caution: Sheep" signs are dotted along all the roadways.

Inscriptions in stone, set into the rocks are a common sight along Skye's walks.  They are usually--though not always--in Gaelic.  This one is Psalm 133.

We headed home while the sun was still quite high in the sky so we could shower and head down to Broadford and Breakish (towns on the far southeast corner of the island) for dinner, because on the way into town we'd seen a little sign by the roadside announcing the "Breakish Folk Club" met every first Monday of the month, and we were in luck to be here for the first Monday of May.

Rachel loves traditional music and I'm always excited to check out a local folk tradition, so we made plans to grab dinner at a seafood restaurant called Claymore (We had Langoustines and Seabream, both excellent! Along with getting to try Skye:Young Pretender (another beer from Skye Brewing company, a local brewery with several different beers we've really enjoyed).

Dinner was delicious, and afterwards we made our way over to the folk club.  On the way there, Rachel looked it up to try to find the address and found out this particular meeting was the AGM ("Annual General Meeting"), and briefly panicked that we might be subjected to an extended session of club business and discussion about local politics, but when we arrived we found out that meant about 10 minutes of cheerful discussion about whether they should raise the entry from £3 to £4 (free tea and biscuits included in admission!) and then we got to the music-making.

The crowd was delightful, a few younger folk, a few retirees, and everyone else somewhere in-between.  All-told it was a crowd of about 25 people and they encouraged everyone to perform at least once, when had a break for tea, then had a second round of performance.  

There were a couple of vocalists, as well as three fiddle players, three or four pipers (bag pipers that is, though there was one person who played a smaller pipe as well), and one woman who played the Hurdy-Gurdy and another who played Nickelharpe.  There were some really lovely and skilled performers and some rank amateurs (plus a few people like me without anything memorized who were just there to enjoy and join in on the occasional chorus), and everyone had a good time and enjoyed each other's company.  Rachel sang the Mingulay Boat Song and Sally Roger's "Agnes" (Won't you come with me?), which I enjoyed getting the chance to sing along with the group since I knew (most of) the words to both of those choruses.

Rachel also got a picture of this fantastic bagpipe cover named "Quentin", who was crocheted by the pipe player's father as a gift.

Quentin

At the end of the evening, Rachel snagged the lyrics to a charming joke-song (about a young man who chokes to death on a potato in potato soup, and goes to heaven only to find out they serve potato soup for dinner there) from Peter, a gentleman in his 70s who sang two different classic songs, with a clear voice and generally ribald lyrics.

During the tea break, one of the primary organizers, Ross, who played bagpipes wonderfully and was an excellent and gracious leader, came over to chat with us and I mentioned we were planning a hike the next day, and he recommended the fantastic WalkHighlands app which we used the next day on a hike into of the Cuillin Hills mountain range.  We'd make serious use of that on Tuesday, during our most excellent hike, which I'll tell you all about soon.