Spring-break on Skye

This is now already a few weeks ago, but in the last week of May, just before the summer holiday season started a six of us trundled up to the Isle of Skye in Scotland where we had booked a small cottage near Portree for a few days. I hadn't quite realized how big the UK really is until it dawned on me that it would be a 600 mi drive each way to get up there for our part and that really only about half of it was going to be on motorways, but anyway ...

Here are some impressions from a wonderful week up north which was quite unusually sunny for the area and the time of the year. It's as if they knew we were coming and hacked the weather accordingly!

Day 1, C playing with perspective in the rocks on the Trotternish ridge. 

This day happened to be L's birthday, so we decided to celebrate accordingly and chucked a sneaky bottle of fizz into my bag - for lunch. Hiking is so much easier after that one! 

L+S on a view-break out of the wind ... 

This picture was taken on a long hike - on a supposedly fearsome piece of rock called the 'bad step'. There was no-one around, except of course for the boat load of tourists, where the captain had decided to show off our hiking skills and tried to race up to us while we were climbing across the slab ... weird. 1km further there was a nest of tourists who had been boated into check out Loch Corusk and the steep Cuillin Hills, but once we left these behind there was hardly anybody for the next 9 miles or so! 

Again, a team looking off the Trotternish ridge

A jumping hobbit - this species might appear when you find that your hiking boots are too small and the ground underfoot is reasonably soft ... 

L hovering above a triangulation point. 

This is the only white beach on the island, called 'coral beach' on account of the fossilized sea-weed. 

The only real down side to the trip was that on the last day our car decided to take the term 'spring-break' a little too literal and suddenly dropped off three turns in one of the rear springs. Of course this happened at 2pm on a Friday afternoon, about as far as you can get from a garage (the one's in Portree didn't have a spare spring, we checked) and exactly on the day before we wanted to drive half-way back home... In the end, we drove about 200mi on the broken spring, first to Ft. William where we learned that the garages didn't stock springs either but that there would be one available in Stirling - somewhat off our planned route but that's where we went...