Sunday, September 6th, 2009: Isle of Skye, Scotland

We often try to stay at least two nights at a hotel to minimize the amount of packing and unpacking that occurs if you shift hotels every day. So we stayed for two nights in the Invergarrie Hotel, which gave us a full day to drive out to the Isle of Skye on the western edge of Scotland. We started out the day driving past Loch Garry westward to the coast, stopping along the way for some pictures.

Our next "Kodak moment" was the very pretty Eilean Doran Castle alongside picturesque Loch Duich. The castle was quite pretty and looked authentic, but I recall reading that it is actually a 19th Century reconstruction. In any event, it wasn't one of the historic sites listed on our Explorer Pass so we continued onward in order to spend as much time on the Isle of Skye as we could.

We passed Loch Alsh, which is the last loch just before you reach the western coast, and saw the graceful bridge over to the Isle of Skye. Loch Alsh is a "sea loch" or a loch that is directly connected to the sea and we could see what looked like ocean-going boats at anchor in the loch.

About 10 miles beyond the bridge we came to the second largest town on Skye, Broadford, and there we found a Co-op food store where we could purchase two bottles of Pepsi and sandwiches for lunch, bread, meat and cheese for dinner, and a bag of pretzels for snacks. We also found some small Melanine plastic plates for 1 pound each and picked up two of those for our collection of traveling china (of course, it IS now all made in China so that name still fits!).

Along the way we saw the typical Isle of Skye scenery, very barren hillsides thrusting up from the sea, but this was with a rainbow in it! The barren hillsides reminded me of the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland except that Dingle was just low rolling hills whereas the mountains on Skye are far bigger and taller. The mountains of Skye also have some forested areas at the lower levels that are apparently used for logging.

We saw a fire truck go tearing by with lights flashing, which is never a good sign, and when we went down the same road a few minutes later we found it blocked by an serious accident. Taking the opportunity to eat our sandwiches, we waited a while but the traffic showed no signs of moving so we made a U-turn to return to Broadford. Our "Plan B" was to drive a route recommended by Fodor's Guide to Scotland, a winding country lane that meandered westward to the small town of Elgol.

The road to Elgol turned out to be a hair-raising drive as the entire 14 miles consisted of a narrow 1-lane with the occasional "passing places" that meant a slightly wider spot in the road where two cars could just conceivably squeeze by each other. In fact, Monika got rather concerned when the wheels over on her side of the car squiggled a bit as they ran right on the edge of the pavement at one such meeting, and I heard her involuntary gasp as we passed the oncoming automobile with inches to spare. Another time I pulled rather suddenly into one of the "passing places" but then had to really jam on the brakes to get stopped before we ran out of pavement, at which point the brakes started pulsating with a loud "thud thud thud thud...". And that is how I found out that the Anti-lock Braking System (ABS) really did work on the Passat. It was good to know, but in retrospect it was maybe something I should have discovered when Monika was not in the car!

To get to Elgol we had to curl in to the point of Loch Slapin and back out to the coast, and clearly there was a fleet of small fishing boats near the mouth of Loch Slapin. On that 1-lane road we also had to contend with numerous sheep just as my neice Patience had warned us about (close encounters of the wooly kind!), although they usually seemed to be in a hurry to get out of our way as soon as possible. We also encountered several cattle, and humans walking on the pavement, but the only species that was waltzing carelessly down the middle of the street was the human!

On our outbound leg I followed what I call my "Irish" style of driving narrow roads with blind corners and hills; namely, creeping around in second gear at 20 mph or less and honking like mad just before each blind hill or just before the apex of a blind curve. That didn't seem to prevent the occasionally scary head-on confrontation with the oncoming car coming at a breakneck pace, and it certainly frustrated the impatient Scottish drivers behind me who wanted to drive far faster on that road. So on our return leg from Elgol I decided to try a different tactic which I have occasionally used in America to avoid radar traps: namely, to carefully and rather closely follow a local driver who presumably knows the road far better than you do. In America I call this my "follow the rabbit" style of driving.

So when a "Flying Scot" passed me I accelerated and followed just far enough back so that I could keep a close eye on his tail lights. By watching his tail lights flash I knew that either a really sharp curve or oncoming traffic was coming ahead and that gave me the extra second I needed to react in time to the situation and slam on the brakes. It did require that we went racing across the landscape at a pace far higher than my "Irish" style of driving, though, and it made Monika "a little" nervous (hands tightly clenched and beads of sweat on her brow).

I followed my Flying Scot until we came up to the ruins of Cill Chriosd (American: Church of Christ), but those ruins looked so intriguing that we pulled over for a picture break. Sheep were grazing in the churchyard among the graves and seemed skittish when we entered the area to take pictures, but otherwise we had the place to ourselves.

It had been raining quite a lot for several days in Scotland (surprise!), so we saw small cascades and waterfalls almost everywhere we looked. It made the landscapes very pretty indeed. After regaining the main highway and turning north for a while (the backup from the accident was gone by that time), we saw a particularly large cascade and stopped to walk over and see it better. The ground all the way over to it was awash in water from the same recent rains that had engorged the cascade, of course, so we both got wet and muddy feet as a result of our walk. It was worth it, however, because the cascade was magnificent.

I was starting to get a little tired of driving, so we turned back to the mainland but took a different route back home. An old wooden sailing ship was just locking through the Caledonian Canal at Fort Augustus , so we stopped to watch her depart the lowest lock into Loch Ness. The road bridge at that point was a swing bridge and that had to rotate out of the way before the ship could leave, but that happened quite quickly.

Our final stop of the night was at the old Oich Bridge over the, you guessed it, Oich River. The new bridge over which we drove was not a bad looking bridge, really, in that it had three graceful stone arches spanning the river. But it could not compare with the old Oich Bridge, built in the mid 1800s, as it was a graceful suspension bridge. Unlike most modern suspension bridges, however, the tension in the old Oich bridge was taken up by iron rods held together with bolts. That may not sound like it was as graceful as a suspension bridge held up by cables, but the iron rods gradually shrank and widened across the span of the bridge and were painted a brilliant white. The net effect was a very pretty little bridge indeed, and like all small suspension bridges I could get it to bounce by jumping up and down in the middle of it in a carefully planned rhythm to reinforce each oscillation of the bridge. Fun! And so to bed.