I ♥ Skye

It's only 19 miles, I thought. How long could that take? At least there was a truck dispensing tea at the top of a very scenic, windy summit.

I headed north from Eyre to Uig and wound around the Trotternish peninsula.

Everything was grand in scale, except the roads, which if anything were narrower than yesterday's.

The rain brought the green.

These cows seemed unperturbed by it.

If a little annoyed by me asking them to pose.

Every bend in the road was unbearably beautiful.

Occasionally the rain stopped. I turned on BBC Scotland on the radio to entertain me, but they spent at least an hour talking about Wimbledon and then another half hour on cricket. I thought it couldn't get any more boring when they found a runner who is hoping to compete in the next summer Olympics after having a child. I was so grateful when I found a station playing folk songs.

 Why did the lamb cross the road?

Eventually I made it to Portree, which was hilly and scenic but jam packed with tourists and paid car packs with tiny parking spaces. I found free parking with wider spaces down the hill, just as it started to pour.

 Portree's most famous ladies are these pastel houses.

The rain meant a long wait at Cafe Arriba, because no one wanted to leave. It was the very definition of cosy, with generous bowls of soup, huge slices of cake, and excellent foamy cappuccino. I got the venison pie and had a long discussion about the Royal Navy's volunteer lifeboat brigade with an older gentleman and a Welsh woman with a campervan. The busiest rescue spot is of course London Bridge, a combination of foolish boaters and attempted suicides and drunken people who just fall into the Thames in the middle of the night. Now you know.

I came back to the B&B after supper, and my California neighbors, who left and said goodbye this morning, returned. They went to Dunvegan castle but made a wrong turn and wound up circling the same peninsula as me. 

Scotland makes the GPS go wrong; probably because the engineerings who make maps are back in Mountain View and Greenwich. All those signs warning "blind summit" are trying to tell us something.