Saturday morning, after a wonderful breakfast at the Balintoy Inn, we were off for our first full day on the Isle of Skye. This is a day I believed I would find stressful. Today, I would be driving a lot of one-lane roads. If you have never driven in rural Scotland (and I am sure anywhere in the UK), you run into one-lane roads. These are roads where there is literally one lane. Not one in each direction, but one lane. You drive along until a car comes towards you, and then you look for a sign that says “Passing Place.” If it is on your side of the road, or you are being courteous, or in the case of us, you want to go slow, then you pull over and let the other car pass you. On the map of our journey, from about The Brother’s Point all the way around to Uig, it was a one-lane road.

But it turned out to be an incredible drive. From the time we hit the first stretch of one-lane road, we were traveling under 30 miles an hour. Not to mention that the Scottish drivers we passed all seemed to understand that we were travelers and not used to driving on that kind of road. I should also mention that you want to go that slow not only because of the one-lane road but because those one-lane roads are full of some of the most enormous potholes known to man ?. If you got into some of them, you might never get out.

The scenery was amazing. Our first big stop was to shoot numerous photos of The Old Man of Storr. This is a one-of-a-kind rock formation just to the north of Portree (before the start of the one-lane road). Now might be an excellent time to show you photos of our first few stops. Don’t forget; if you click the first shot, you can then scroll through with your arrow keys or by swiping…and PLEASE…don’t look at my photography on a phone. Please…

Heading north from The Old Man, we stopped at different places to get out, walk around and take photos. We saw more waterfalls, a beautiful coastline and constantly changing weather. These are the shots that I got prior to hitting the one-lane roads.

From this point on, it’s one-lane road. Straight around the top of Skye until we reached Uig. As you can see, this is where the one-lane starts.

We soon found out that cars weren’t the only things on the road either. In a quick change from our usual media, Kathleen took a short video of some of the creatures we ran into on this part of the trip. Please excuse the voices and the camera work. It was a really bumpy road.

[videopress JEAfgfrg]

It took us around an hour from the time the road turned into one lane until we got around to Uig, a small town on the west coast of Skye. We stopped there for lunch for a very nice burger and…chips. I can’t believe I am going to say this, but I am really tired of “chips.” For those who have yet to travel to the UK or watch Ted Lasso, a chip is what we in America would call a large steak fry (what we call chips are crisps here). You know the kind of fry I am talking about. Big and thick. Supposed to be crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside. You get them here with anything that they would serve regular french fries with at home, including the ever-popular fish and chips. I think they are perfect in most places, but they are getting old at this point and have just become a great conduit to get ketchup into my mouth. And in Uig, the ketchup (served only in tiny packets—so wasteful) was sour. Yuck. Usually, when I see something comes with fries, that’s an incentive to order it. With chips, that’s now a reason not to.

After lunch in Uig (please don’t ask me how to pronounce it), we drove up above the town and shot this set of photos I used to create my panoramas (I don’t use my phone for panoramic images. I prefer using my Nikon and taking multiple shots which I then stitch together in Photoshop.) Here’s the town, down below. As you can see, this is not a metropolis.

Following Uig, we headed back to Portree for an afternoon of shopping and just hanging out. I got to shoot a few pics of downtown. It reminded me of Lerwick in the Shetland Islands, a town we visited a few years ago and will return to next week on our Viking cruise. The Antlers Inn (you can see in the photo) is where we had eaten the night before.

That concluded our day…except for a nap for Kathleen, a bunch of photo processing for me and dinner at the Rosedale Inn, where I had the best seafood dish I have had in ages. I mentioned yesterday that the food here has been amazing, and last night (our last dinner in Portree) had also been that way.

It doesn’t matter if it’s soggy or it’s sunny, there are so many lovely roads and awesome rugged countryside in Scotland – that’s what makes it.  —Edd China