Skye to Inverness to Orkney

Hi everyone

We can hardly believe that it's August already! That means we come home in nine days... so much to pack in between now and then. Christine and I are actually really good travelling companions in that we seem to have the same disposition towards our activities; when I feel like eating, so does she, when she wants to get out of the city, I am in agreement, and so on. We have disagreed about precious little -- indeed, nothing really comes to mind! It's all good.

Some random observations:

The cool thing about driving around in Scotland is that all the signs are in Gaelic and in English, and sometimes you can see how they have just made up the English words to be as similar sounding to the original Gaelic ones... so you get some pretty funny place names. I really wanted to visit Tongue, but it just wasn't in the cards for today. ;) We did get to John o' Groats and Portnalong and Sligachen though.

And, as a few of you warned, there are roundabouts everywhere instead of stoplights, which is great -- there haven't really been any bottlenecks unless there was construction, although the traffic is much faster when there are two lanes rather than those treacherous one-laners. I don't much like those!

On the sides of the roads and beyond are sheep. A few times I caught myself thinking about the nice dog sitting there, and then realized that it was a sheep. Although they seem to gravitate away from human bodies, they are generally unphased by the huge motor vehicles hurtling down the road... sometimes they walk right down the middle, taking their sweet time. Christine calls those ones "kamikaze death-wishers"... and there are a few drivers like that here too.

I also really like how the outlets in the walls have switches, and you have to turn the switch on to get power, so that it conserves energy. Why don't we have those??

Midges suck, big time. They are tiny biting little bugs that get you. We hate them. They are everywhere. Smaller than moquitoes, and more insidious.

They offer English mustard and French mustard at the restaurants here. Ironically, it's the English mustard that looks like the regular yellow "French's" mustard I have back home in my fridge. French mustard is black. BLACK. Tastes like mustard, though, despite its look of tar. And no, I haven't had haggis yet.


Ok, so back to the travel update. I will try to be brief (hah!).

We drove from Skye and stayed at a B&B in Inverness with a mildly cranky lady who was mad that we were late checking in - she tried to lie and say that she had re-let our room but when we made to leave she suddenly found it to be empty. Hmmm. We didn't like Inverness much -- just a city with a mall, and it wasn't quaint or beautiful and there wasn't much there to see, or that we wanted to see.

Outside of Inverness, though, are some amazing sites. Like the Culloden Battlefield, which was the best visitor center and facility we have been to yet. Simply excellent. We also saw Cawdor Castle, where Macbeth is supposed to have been set for Shakespeare's play, and we went to Fort George but it was closed when we got there. We also saw Loch Ness (and Nessie, of course) and Urquhart Castle. Both were pretty good.

Today we drove up the east coast of Scotland and went to the most northern tip. We caught the ferry to Orkney, and we are here for 2 nights. We LOVE the place that we are staying at (not the least of which because they have fast & free internet), it's right by the water with amazing views and we are SO excited to be in Orkney. We have some very famous archaeological sites to visit tomorrow. On Sunday we go back to Inverness.

Today was the first day we got caught in the rain and wind... it was very hard to take good photos. Hopefully it's nice out tomorrow! I hope you guys are having great weather too!
xo
Elaan