So it's Isle of Skye

There's a song by Aerosmith that has the line: Life's a journey, not a destination.
Well, this totally applies on (no, apart from my life) this 4 day trip we're doing. Ok, the Highlands are simply beautiful, really beautiful! And the road to Skye was really pleasant.


But it wasn't only a matter of getting to Skye, just enjoying the scenery was half the purpose of the trip, maybe 75% even, so that's what we did, aided by yesterday's taxi driver's advice and a mistake either by the GPS or the GPS user...can't say which for sure :p but we ended up driving along small inner roads, between fields, mountains, lakes and what not! Even ended up crossing a lock that was operating when we arrived, it was cool, i have to admit it's the first time i see one like this, a small bridge hinged at one end, that rotates from the "across the canal" position (Caledonian canal by the way) to the "parallel to the bank" position to let the boats pass, then back to let the cars pass.

Passing Braemar I remembered the driver mentioning the place, so we decided to turn into there, then on the way saw the sign for Blair castle on Atholl estates and headed over there instead. The castle (and estates) belong to the Dukes and Earls of Atholl as the name implies, what was nice about it is the little wood they had there, huge trees and silence, nice! Also the animals they kept around, they had deer, horses, peacocks and highland cows, plus gardens, etc. You don't know what a highland cow is? shaggy, red haired, big cows? Ok, you'll see it when i go back to bragging about the animals i photographed :p

After that we had continued the journey north to Mallaig to take the ferry to Skye, almost missed it, got there like 3 minutes before it went, and of course it was the last one of the day.

Isle of Skye has rough terrain, loads of rock, in all possible shapes and heights, and it wasn't a long drive to get to Portree where we were booked into a nice little inn called Marmalade inn, so small that in the morning they noticed that we didn't come down for breakfast and give us cereal bars for the road :)

Portree is like the capital of Skye, well, the main city, the drive from the ferry which pulls on at Armadale is along the east coast of the island, but what lies on the west coast is for the blog of day 3 :)