Month: March 2015 (Page 1 of 4)

Well, the travel gods shined on us a little more today…but only slightly 🙂

We have wifi tonight obviously, because I’m posting this! And after basically 3 days of no internet, I need a 12 step program. I know I have an obsession with technology, I embrace it. Lol

We had breakfast this morning at our little hotel from The Shining. Lol our waitress, if I can call her that, since she said “coffee or tea?” And we said coffee, and she pointed and said “it’s on the counter” … Said she was “born, bred, buttered and toasted in Portree.” That it was a family tradition to work at the Tongadale Hotel… Her mother worked there. Even stopped in for a couple shots of vodka before she headed to the hospital to have her. She said “in,out and home in time for Dr Who” lol She was a witty one.

We backtracked first thing- trying to see the Old Man of Storr rock formation and dinosaur footprints and were successful on both!

The fog had lifted just enough to catch the formation…and it looked really cool with the fog behind it.   

 

We drove on up to Staffin beach. It took us 45 minutes but then Kegan found the footprint 🙂

More than likely, a Megalosaurus from the middle Jurassic period. A baby T-Rex looking thing…note the three toed print.

  

Low tide meant we could walk out over the planes covered yesterday

  

A carved replica on a rock at the beach  

The real deal.  

 

It had been sleeting and raining all morning so we needed this victory! 🙂

We then went back to Talisker Distillery so Kegan could get his special Scotchy Scotch.

 

Kegan saw his dream vehicle there in the parking lot. If we ever move to Europe, I can almost guarantee you that’s the vehicle he would drive lol a Land Rover Defender.

 

  

 

Finally we headed back towards real civilization, open coffee houses and wifi. 😉

Great views on the way back to the mainland

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

Most of our drive was pouring rain… So not many good pictures today

 

 

Because of that- its a good slow day to put in a couple random things I’ve forgotten around Scotland before we leave 🙂

Random animals- we keep seeing “stags” which we can only assume are Elk. Also, grouse and pheasants. Kegan managed to catch a pheasant on camera the other day. we’ve probably seen a dozen so far.

 

 Saw a swan on a little lake yesterday. That was cool.

  

Also, a couple days ago we found a little antique shop where we bought a couple small  things. 

I found an early 1900s copy of The Pilgim’s Progress by John Bunyan. It’s actually sort of a sacrilege to buy this in Scotland since John Bunyan was one of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan followers in the mid 1600s. Puritan Britains were burning and bombing Scotland at that time. Lol

Mark Twain’s book that I based this blog on is “The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrim’s Progress” – referencing this book.

The book is an early fiction book of Christian allegory. Using symbolism to tell a story of religious pilgrimage and a deepening of faith through voyage and understanding. What makes it cool to me is that he wrote this while in prison for preaching without a license (yeah…that was a thing) and he had never read any other work of fiction supposedly- only the Bible. This story came to him in a dream/vision…and he wrote it as the dream of an anonymous main character. 

   

  

The inside front cover says:

St Thomas — Parrish Church  Prize Awarded to William A Melvin (?) for regular attendance 1914.

  

Kegan found a Highland horn whiskey glass set. I don’t think they’re very old…maybe 1960s… But still a pretty cool souvenir 🙂

  

  

Also, at a gift shop today, I bought Norah a junior bagpipes LOL Kegan is glaring at me like, you can’t be serious….” But have you seen this kid around music and instruments? It’s what makes her world go around… So bagpipes it is! 🙂 I cannot wait to watch her flip when she finds out we bought them and the sound they make! (After we get back to Florida of course…we would not be good hotel guests with a toddler playing bagpipes. Haha)

We were staying in the town of Oban tonight in what could be my great-grandmother’s house….complete with old ratty pink flower towels. (I mean, really? How expensive would a set of towels be??) Bed and breakfasts- hit or miss. This one has a bright turquoise blue toilet seat… I’m not sure if that’s a strike or a check in its favor…its gotta be almost as rare as the dinosaur footprints, right? 🙂

  

We are here because this is where the ferry over to the Isle of Mull leaves from…however we called the guy who runs the ferry out to the island of Staffa to Fingal’s cave and he said he wouldn’t be running the boat tomorrow because the weather was supposed to be terrible. 

Here’s what we are missing 🙁 sadly…

   

  

 

Oh well…you can’t win them all. Gives me a reason to come back 🙂

So instead we’re just going to head on to Glasgow and see what trouble we can get into there. G’night!

No internet again last night. Sorry 🙂

Today was a day of disappointing Murphy’s travel law. Lol

Nothing major happened, just annoyance after annoyance. 

First, we set out to find “proper” coffee. I can’t do standard drip coffee, I’m a total coffee snob. Has to be strong. Scotland doesn’t understand my need for espresso. We passed about 4 cafes- all of which have big signs along the road. Closed. All of them. lol 

So, we decided to go by the Talisker distillery and get Kegan a bottle of good Scotch that he tried the other night. Closed on weekends- until next weekend. Lol

Ok, on to the next item- Neist Point and Lighthouse. Couldn’t find it.

Ok, on to Dunvegan, there’s a cool castle there! Closed. Took these from down the road

    

    

At this point we were miserable because it’s pouring down rain and we are all going to pee our pants. We stop off at a pier that has a little gas station that is open. (We would later circle back to this gas station when we had under 1/4 tank of gas around 5pm to find that it closed at 4pm)

They had an instant coffee machine and Red Bull, so I was set lol

We continued on to Fairy Glen. Now this was our one success of the day! It was so amazing. This tiny miniature landscape- it’s easy to see why superstitious people believed the fairies lived here.

 

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

Next, we were bound for the Cave of gold, but after reading the directions better…it said it shouldn’t be attempted if the grass was wet and since it had been pouring rain all morning we decided to abort mission. We didn’t want to hike two miles to either fall off into the ocean or see nothing. We did see some cool scenery along the way.

   

 

This is the round tower in Uig also known as Captain Fraser’s Folly. Captain Fraser had it built in the 1800s as a show of wealth basically.  He had all of his land tenants come here to pay their rents. He was a hated man in his time and was one of the land owners responsible for “The Highland Clearances”- where the land owners evicted massive amounts of people, mostly the Gaelic people, from the Scottish Highlands to make room for large-scale sheep farming. Some of these people had farmed their land for hundreds of years and because of the lack of protections, most were forced to relocate to the sea lands or the lowlands immediately- leaving their crops in the ground and with no time to construct a dwelling on their new land.   

      

 

 

  

There is a big Alpine influence on Skye because the Alpine Climbing club from Switzerland spent at least 7 years on the isle in the late 1800s climbing and mapping the peaks. There are lots of thatched roofs and Swiss cottage style houses.

  

So, Dinosaur footprints. Kegan has been so excited for this. Staffin beach has a small little piece of rock that was uncovered/weathered about 10 years ago where you can see the tracks left by some big carnivorous dinosaurs. Like 2 ft long tracks…

   

         

So we looked and looked, but no luck. It’s one of those things that is really rare to find. You can only see the rock bed at low tide and only in the spring after the winter storms have washed away the sand off the beach and before it is deposited again in the summer. 

We decided to go to the Fossil museum just up the road  and ask for better directions and about the tides. Closed.

At this point we all had to use the bathroom again and it was still pouring so we headed to a portree where our hotel for the evening was. We dropped Mom and baby off there and we went back to a couple more things and to try to see the footprints agin at what we thought would be a lower tide.

We went back to kilt rock and Mealt falls which was really going strong since it was raining.

 

  

    

 We tried to see the jagged rock outcropping called the “Old man of storr” but it was fogged out. Couldn’t see that high up. Bummer. We’ll try again tomorrow.

We went back to Staffin Beach to find dinosaurs again. The tide was even higher! Magicseaweed.com says low tide is 10:51am tomorrow- so one last attempt!

We then realized that we would need gas before We drove back to Staffin tomorrow, so we searched the GPS. It showed only like 3 gas stations in the whole island. So we headed out to one. It closed like 10 years ago. Ok, we’ll go back to the one from this morning- closed at 4pm. Ok, check out the third- it wasn’t a real gas station. 

So back to portree….we started thinking- wait…surely a town the size of Portree has a gas station. And sure enough, they did. It just wasn’t on the map. But it was closed too. Lol but at least we knew we could go in he morning.

Apparently, Skye doesn’t really “open” until Easter…and even then really closes down on Sundays. 

However, the grocery store had Crabbies- this awesome alcoholic ginger beer I just found the night before…and then the bar had it. The bartender recommended the Indian restaurant across the street, so that’s what we had for dinner. 

Apparently Tikka Masala is not the same in the UK as it is in Irand or the U.S. ..or maybe this particular Indian restaurant just THINKS that it’s different haha they brought it out and it was so sweet with coconut that it was almost like a candy sauce over lamb. It was terrible haha but Kegan’s was good- so we split his. 

   

   

So…here is hoping that today is much better! Otherwise Scotland is not going to be remembered favorably! Lol

Other landscapes:

   

   

 

Cute little street we stayed on in Portree

 

  

  

  

We started our morning overlooking the ocean in Johnshaven. The tiny town was literally built on the edge of the water. This was from our front door.

   

  

I could have stayed here for a while, too. 

We headed north and west through a few little towns. There wasn’t much to really photograph… Just rolling fields and sheep and highway. Looked a lot like Indiana if you substitute the sheep for cows.

We did see a sign for the “Maiden Stone” a half mile off the road, so we detoured- cuz lord knows I love me a good nerdy history lesson. Lol 

Turned out to be pretty cool. The stone is from about the 800s. It is a Pictish slab stone.

The Picts were the original Scottish tribes of the north and east. There were also The Gaels. Eventually, they merged along with a couple other tribes and formed Scotland- and Scots refers to all combined tribes of present day Scotland.

This stone is pink granite and has weathered pretty bad. You can see a mirror and comb at the bottom though which is weird ha

The legend is that the notch in the stone is where the Devil’s hand was sitting on the Maiden’s shoulder when he turned her to stone. Or it could just be that pink granite is really hard to carve. Lol

      

 I thought this would be the biggest stone we would see…until we drove along further and found Sueno’s Stone- the largest Pict stone. Wow. It has an entire story of a battle carved into it.

They actually put a housing around it! I am constantly appalled at how many of these cultural artifacts are just sitting out in the rain…

   

    Amazing intricate cross design on the back 

Picture with Kegan for scale. This thing is huge!

We tried to see Cawdor Castle but it’s closed until May. We snuck a picture from the back gate  🙂

  

Our first real glimpse of the highlands 

What a view.. 🙂 

Our first glimpse of Loch Ness! 

Can you find Nessie?

  The rocks and ledges all have a very cool look and the trees had a cool moss on them.  

     

Kegan hiked back to a waterfall that had little carved stone poetry inscriptions along the way.       

 

         

    

A good sampling of locals- white, brown and spotted. I just love the sheep. They make me happy.

   

My camera lens is so wide angle it actually makes these hills appear average. lol I assure you, they are awesome looking in person and the photos don’t do them justice.

   

     

  As we were driving around Loch Ness we saw these deer (elk?) crossing

  

 

How perfect is this? Captured a rainbow directly over Loch Ness!  

And We found “Lady Ness” 🙂  Norah loved the “dinosaur” haha  

    

 

Feet leading to the gift shop 

 

   

More highlands tomorrow. Probably won’t be a ton to show except for the scenery….but I will find plenty I’m sure 🙂