A Midnight Ride to Skye

Our flight to Edinburgh was delayed a couple of hours by Heathrow airport shenanigans, and despite our crew's best efforts (gate-to-gate in 60 minutes for a 90-minute flight), they couldn't actually turn back time.

By the time we had gotten caffeine and talked Hertz out of giving us an "upgrade" -- because they hadn't saved us the Clio we had booked (an SUV is not an improvement on roads this narrow, kids!), we found ourselves headed out of Edinburgh in a Toyota CHR around 18:00 with a six+ hour drive ahead of us.  

Ah well, it's the right color, at least.

We figured out the route, and Rachel took first shift, as she has had previous experience with the whole "driving on the left" element, an experience I have thus far dodged in all of my travels.

We grabbed a very solid serving of fish and chips in a small town along the route, and on the way back to the car picked up a serving of ice cream -- they had a local whiskey flavor that was excellent, and I also tried their "tablet" ice cream.  Turns out Tablet is a Scottish sweet, similar to fudge, but made from a sort of brown sugar/ caramel/condensed milk (my strategy of "pick the flavors you don't recognize" continues to be a winning one.)

We also stopped to grab some breakfast foods and a bottle of wine since everything would be closed by the time we arrived in Skye.

Night fell about half-way through our drive, before we had reached the bridge to the Isle of Skye, cloaking the Scottish countryside in an inky blackness and limiting the hints of its beauty to the shape of the Lochs, which glimmered around us in the dark, reflecting the soft silver-gray of the moonless sky above.

We're staying in Staffin, a stone's throw from the North-east tip of the Isle, which meant 3 very draining hours of driving in the dark on winding, 1.5 lane two-way roads. Thankfully, we were so late getting in that there was almost no traffic to meet. 

The two of us kept each other awake well on the drive, which was good. With maybe 8 hours of coach-class airplane "sleep" between us in the past day and half, each of us could not have done it safely alone.

 We finally reached our Airbnb just before 1:00, had a glass of wine and congratulated ourselves on surviving the drive, then crashed hard and woke late, getting breakfast together around 11:00.

 

With light, we also found out just how stunning the view is from the back door of our Airbnb.

I would come to find out soon that Skye's vistas are consistently incredible, in striking and unforgiving ways.  There's another beautiful view like this around every bend in the road.

We grabbed much-appreciated showers, made a proper grocery list, and drove down to Portree, the nearest proper town, for a lunch and a wander through the shops, stopping in the tourist information to pick up a hiking guidebook and some proper maps.  We discovered a pub where we grabbed lunch and confirmed there would be a live band playing tonight, then got our shopping done and made the drive back up the Staffin.

Along the way we stopped at a picturesque little waterfall just south of the Old Man of Storr (a local rock formation that I'm excited to show you later) so that I could take a few pictures while Rachel sketched, I'm excited to get some of those uploaded tomorrow and post a couple. 

We made it back to the airbnb, dropped off our food and took a break and scrounged dinner (with a broiler, bread, ham, eggs, and great UK cheddar, we were able to make reasonable fascimiles of "Croque madame" for dinner, and they were excellent).

Then back to Portree for a couple of bottles of Skye Brewing Co.'s excellent beers, and to listen to the local live band that was playing the 1820 pub -- Atlantic Reel.

Sometimes I forget that one of the US's greatest exports is pop music and culture, and then I find myself in a small town in the hinterlands of Scotland listening to a band cover, among other things:

Good Riddance ("The Time of Your Life") (Green Day)

Free Fallin' (Tom Petty)

The Gambler (Kenny Rogers)

Travelin' Soldier (The Chicks)
&

Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash)

The band was great, and the crowd loved it.  The pianist in particular had a too-skilled-for-this "Piano man" vibe (what are you doing here?) that went over very well.

To be fair, to balance out some of the Americana, they did throw in Francis McPeake's Wild Mountain Thyme and the Cranberrie's Zombie.

All in all, a great night, and now we're back at the Airbnb getting ready to try to defeat the jetlag by getting a proper night's sleep.