The Isle of Skye June 17, 2003

Tuesday morning they got us started early as we had to catch a train.  This train runs from Fort William to Mallaig and is the route that they used in Harry Potter.  In fact, if you catch the 10:00 train, you get to ride in the old coaches used in the film and are pulled by the steam engine they used in the film as well.  However, we took the 8:30 train which was a conventional diesel electric self contained motor car.  The scenery was very interesting, but as it was raining, no way to get a good picture through the wet glass.

We got to Mallig just in time to catch the ferry over to the Isle of Skye.  Our bus driver had driven around the train route and met us there.  It was somewhat questionable if there was room on the ferry for the bus (there was already another bus on the ferry), but they managed to get one of the cars to turn sideways enough that we all fit.  So the picture on the right shows us "running" to get on boat as they are ready to sail.

The weather was not at all nice, there was a wind blowing and a light rain, but as this picture shows, even with poor weather the scenery was really pretty neat.

The Isle of Skye is one set of mountains after another with only a circumferential road around them.  That road was easily wide enough for our coach, but not for anybody to pass us, so every time another car came by, we had to pull of to the side to let them pass.  The good news is that by this time, the weather had cleared up and we had dry weather with some sun.

The cliff on the left is called Kilt cliff because the striations in the wall look much like the tartan of a Kilt.  This stopping place is 1 of about 3 places on the Island where there's room to pull a coach off and take pictures, thus we spent most of the day riding and looking.

Near the end of the day, we came down to Kyleakin, the old Ferry position on the north of the Island (there's now a bridge there).  I took this picture as Donnie was making a 3 point turn trying to get around a hairpin turn in the road.

.We spent the night in the village of Portree, a little fishing village on the east side of the island.  Most of the people were put into Bed and Breakfast accommodations up the road, but they didn't have enough, so 6 families stayed in hotels in town.  That meant that Marnie and I could go photo shopping after dinner instead of visit with our B&B hosts, which actually worked out quite well as you can see.  (More on Portree is available from 2005)