A Full Day of Northern Skye

by | Jun 9, 2024 | Photography

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

From Oban to Portree–a transition day

by | Jun 8, 2024 | Food Experiences, Photography

I tried to come up with a wittier headline than that but it really says it all. The Isle of Skye is drop-dead gorgeous. Of course, there are some who would find a tropical island with lots of sun much more to their liking but for me, give me Scotland.

Move to Skye Friday

I almost forgot that the last post only got you to the end of a very long Thursday. On Friday we were up, fed and on the road…leaving Oban by 9:30 to drive north and a little west to the ferry at Mallaig. On the way, we drove through some lovely countryside and stopped for a few photographs. We stopped for lunch in Mallaig just before we boarded the ferry. Here’s a map of our drive on Friday.

We had done our research on a number of Scotland travel groups on Facebook and one thing we had learned was you better have ferry reservations before you go or you aren’t getting on. We had ours and there were a few cars behind us who didn’t make our trip. They got to wait and hope they could get on the next boat two hours later. Below are our final shots from the mainland and the village of Mallaig. 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…

The ferry ride took about 45 minutes and then we arrived in Armadale…finally on the Isle of Skye. We stopped briefly to visit Armadale Castle and Gardens where we had our best example of Scottish weather yet. We entered the castle grounds and walked a very short distance to the castle itself. I shot about 15 photos. At this point I had been looking out to sea and at the castle in beautiful, warm sunlight.  I told Kathleen to wait for a couple of minutes while I went out to shoot the castle from in front of the lawn. In the time it took me to reach the front of the lawn and turn around to shoot the photos (about two minutes) a huge rain squall moved in and I yelled at Kathleen to get back to the entrance or get soaked and I took the shots and ran. In less than those 120 seconds it went from beautiful sunshine to POURING rain. By the time we got back to the entrance gift shop, we were soaked.

From Armadale we drove north to our home for our three days on Skye, the Balintoy Bed and Breakfast. The three nights are the longest consecutive stay on the trip (until the cruise next week) and we are glad they are here at this very small bed and breakfast. The owner Gillian has been wonderful pre-trip with lots of very valuable info. Things like telling me that if we didn’t book tables for our three nights here we would not get into any restaurant and would be forced to eat dinners from food stands…if we were lucky. She was so right. I had made reservations for all three nights and at every place we have been (we are on our third morning as I write this) there have been signs saying, “Sorry, we are booked full!”

The Balintoy also has the largest room we have had on this trip so we get to spread out a little. The breakfasts are excellent and light. We needed a couple of days of granola, fruit and yogurt instead of the protein-heavy Scottish breakfasts in Glasgow and Oban. We were also able to get some laundry done. We have been out for more than a week now and there were a few things that needed washing to get us through until we board Viking Venus on the 14th. Kathleen had found the Skye Laundry Service online before we left. They pick up a good-sized, full bag of laundry and return it to you clean and folded the next day for only £20. Quite the deal for a busy traveler. Ours was picked up yesterday and we will get it back today. Until then we are touring naked ?. Not really. I wanted to see if you are still paying attention.

We had dinner at The Antlers Inn which is located inside the Portree Hotel in downtown Portree (the largest town on Skye) and made our plans for our drive around the island on Saturday.

I want to stop for a moment to say that not only have we had great food here in Scotland but the people in the restaurants have been awesome. The servers have taken VERY good care of us, the other patrons have been fun to either watch or talk to and all our dining experiences have been outstanding. For instance, The Antlers Inn had superb background music. We asked our server what it was and she said she loved it too but wasn’t sure. She rushed off to ask her manager who came out and we had five minutes of discussion about the music. That kind of thing. People just being people. That’s what travel is all about. But we do have to admit that many times we have needed subtitles on this trip. Scots have one of my favorite accents but the farther out from the cities you go, the deeper it gets and sometimes we will just look at each other and smile. I know that this means that one day I will end up eating haggis or blood pudding but I would rather do that than insult someone by asking them to repeat it four times, or to slow down. We usually get it by the third ?.

See you tomorrow (or maybe later today) with the story of our first FULL day on Skye. It was beautiful.

I come more to Scotland than I ever used to, so I feel more connected to it, more part of the zeitgeist. You know when you realize you have a choice and I’m choosing my homeland. It’s funny: when you get older these things creep up to you.  —Allen Cumming

Been awhile…but it’s almost time to go again

by | Apr 27, 2024 | Air travel, Photography

Greetings, loyal (I hope) readers. It’s been a while—like since New Year’s Eve. I just wanted to give you a heads-up about some upcoming posts coming your way in late May and pretty much all of June.

Yes, it’s time to travel again. And what a trip we have planned. A full month in Europe will first take us to see two of our oldest and dearest friends, Paul & Gail, in Leeds, England. But before that, we get to try an entirely new airline that will take us from Seattle to Heathrow—Virgin Atlantic. We have never flown with them before, and to make it even more special, we have never (after more than 230 flights) flown on a 787 Dreamliner, but we will on this flight.

When we get to London, we will transfer to Kings Cross station for our train ride to Leeds. That should be fun. We are with Paul and Gail for a long weekend and then we are off on another train to the west coast of Scotland. Both Kathleen and I love everything about Scotland, and since we have spent a lot of time on the eastern coast  (Edinburgh, Inverness, Stirling, etc.), we thought we needed to do the west side, including Glasgow, Oban and the Isle of Skye. Here’s what our route looks like.

Once we finish our Scotland journey, we grab a train back to London (actually Greenwich) for a couple of days. While we are there, we are going to do two things I am really looking forward to. First, we are traveling to Richmond to take a one-of-a-kind Ted Lasso tour. This tour goes to all of the places where they filmed my absolute favorite television show of all time. That night, we are back in the West End to see a new musical (that was nominated for an Olivier Award), Kathy and Stella Solve A Murder!

The next morning, we start the BIG second half of our journey, a Viking Ocean cruise down the Thames River to the North Sea to sail to Edinburgh, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, Scotland as well as Honningsvåg, Tromsø, Bodø, Geiranger and Bergen, Norway.

After the cruise and a day in Bergen, we fly back to London (via Copenhagen), where we will spend the night at an airport hotel before another ride on Virgin Atlantic’s 787 back to Seattle.

All this means lots of photography and, hopefully, my usual daily updates for the full month of June. So stand by. We leave on May 30th. I will check in again before we go.

Adventure is just bad planning.  —Roald Amundsen