Day 13 – Isle of Skye – McKinney Gypsy Caravan

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.