Fort William to the Isle of Skye

Greetings from the other side of the Atlantic!

Today we saw the Commando momument, the Well of the Seven Heads, and the Eilean Donan Castle. The castle was amazing! A recreation of a medieval castle and in the most amazing setting on the water. Excellent!

I forgot to mention yesterday that Christine & I went on the first of our many, many whiskey distillery tours. Just joking... I don't think we will go to that many -- maybe one more. We went to the Oban Distillery in Oban, and it was a small, traditional distillery so we are thinking that we might go again to one of the bigger ones to compare. In fact where we are staying right now on Skye is very close to the Talisker Distillery, so we may go there.

Whisky... oh my. Not a drink for me! They gave us two tastes of it on the tour, and the first one wasn't completely through the process yet and it was at like 55% alcohol -- tasted like rubbish! Made the back of my throat burn and my mouth water... ick. By the time we got to the end of the tour and they gave us the good stuff, it tasted much better -- must be a ploy to make people think whiskey tastes good (sorry, Dad & Wes, I will still keep my eye out for that Lagavulin you want).

Also, I had my first stint driving on the wrong side of the road -- SO weird. The hard part is that your body wants to be on the right instead of the left so you have to be careful to not drift over to the shoulder. Today Christine was a little nervous when I came a little close to a cyclist. :P The other hard part of driving on the left is shifting with your left hand! That takes some getting used to. But other than that, it's actually been pretty intuitive. We just wish the the roads over here weren't so bloody narrow!

And that leads me to our first great tragedy of the trip. Haha, okay so it wasn't a tragedy, more like an adventure to keep us humble! Just outside of the Isle of Skye we were driving on a highway in the middle of nowhere with nobody around, and we hear a strange noise, so we pull over. Sure enough, yes, it's an extremely flat tire!! Oh goody gumdrops. I was mildly phased at first but Christine jumped right in and started pulling the spare out of the trunk and between the two of us we had the jack and wheel lock (thank goodness I had one of those on my car or we may have been hooped!) all figured out and we changed that tire pronto! Dad would have been proud.

Even though we wracked our brain to find a good reason for why the tire was flat, we just can't figure it out. We called the rental company who basically told us that we were on our own because we were so far away from civilization (we are way out here in the country, people!), and that we would have to pay for it ourselves since it was obviously "driver error" which pissed us off a bit. Me so more than Christine, but whatever.

We got to where we were going on Skye (a hostel, but with a private room, yay!), drove into town, found the garage, they found us a tire and replaced it for us all within about 30 minutes, and we are now pleased as punch to be back on the road in fine form! If that's the worst thing to happen on the trip then we are lucky-lucky.

Tomorrow we are driving all over the island. We have some sightseeing to do and then Christine wants to go shopping. We are 2 nights here on Skye, and then on to Inverness!

Hope y'all are well.
xo
Elaan