We came, we saw, we planked

Yes, we know.  Planking is SO yesterday.  That said, Scotland isn't the most current country.  They still have some very manual processes.  Many in the service sector are ruddy-faced aged men, clinging on before Scotland replaces them with a handheld device.  

The country is quaintly antiquated.  We may just be the first to bring planking to the Highlands.

Bad Dinner Theatre

Alcohol and lost dreams of stardom contributed to our playing a game of dinner theatre.  Kim and Jen have been in plays and they were clearly, desperately clinging to the notion that with the right breaks, they could have been stars.  Mike and I were drunk.

Our game was to come up with a scene and over-act it out.  Feel free to come up with your own interpretations of what we are playing out.

A wee bit of golf in Scotland ...

Mike and I were able to get out and golf on Monday and Wednesday.  Golfing in Scotland.  There you go.

On Monday we golfed at the Skye Golf Course.  They opened at 9:00am but we were worried that we wouldn't get to fit everything we wanted to do if we started that late.  We talked to the woman running the club and she said she would leave out rental clubs and we could start whenever we wanted before they officially opened.  I love that the woman wouldn't consider taking my credit card and completely trusted that we would not run off with the clubs.

As for the golf, let's just say that we suck.  But who cares!  Golfing in Scotland!  And we ended our day with a wee bit of scotch.

  

Wednesday we golfed at Tobermoray Golf Club.  This is the best course.  I mean, this could be the best course I've ever played.  It's not the best manicured grass.  It doesn't have a great club house.  But for sheer fun, quirkiness, challenge, location and aesthetic beauty this is it.

Here is some more detail on why I love this course.  

Gordon, the groundskeeper, saw us at the club house and gave us a bit of a tour.  When we said we needed rental clubs he told us we needed to go to Brown's hardware in town.  The hardware store was the place to rent clubs!  How great is that?  But before we went down town he said he'd check the locker room.  He began to pull out mixed clubs and even found one of his old sets he said we could use.  Again, in Massachusetts you'd be given the high hat and sent on your way.

As for the course.... To get to the sixth hole you basically have to scale a hill the steepness of K2.  Once there, and you caught your breath, the views were spectacular.  You looked across to see the green far off in the distance.  In between you and the green you had to repel down a hill and then scale back up the other one.  The hills on this course were unreal.  Just what you'd expect out of Scotland.

But I fear I've lost everyone who reads our blog.  Not a golfer in the group.

Single Track Road

Today we drove for miles on the longest single track road in Scotland.  In most spots the road is barely wide enough for one car and there are little "passing places"  (this is the official name for them) where one car can pull over so that a car going in the opposite direction can go past.  If they can make the road wide enough for the passing places, why can't they just make the WHOLE road that wide??

Poor Bill had to do all the driving since the rental car is in his name.  I rode shot gun and added to his excitement by gasping when a car came close or pointing out spectacular views, saying "wow look at that!!" when it was impossible for Bill to take his eyes off the road.  I also took a bunch of pictures trying to capture his white knuckle experience. I don't think these quite show how treacherous it was.  The road was so twisty and hilly that we were constantly going around blind turns and over blind summits - you just didn't know if another car was coming until it was right there in front of you.

Here is a car coming towards us from around a corner - - to move aside we basically have some grass and then a sheer drop down to the water.

 Our destination was the ferry to the Isle of Mull.  Since we arrived in plenty of time we thought it best to reward our driver with a pint.  Yes, that is a wood fire in the fireplace of the pub - - it may be summer in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere but not in the Scottish Highlands.

Me and My Old Man of Storr

At the risk of all our blog posts looking the same - here is some more Highland scenery.  It's beautiful but I have to admit that it's getting a bit hard to tell one area from another from the pictures.   Monday we spent the day driving the entire perimeter of Skye.

One mountain range that is easy to identify is the Storr because of this finger jutting up called the Old Man of Storr.   Not sure why this would be called an old man...maybe an old man on viagra?

We stopped in Portree and found an awesome bakery/cafe that did platters of venison salami, sausage,  and a variety of cheese as well as bread with goat cheese and spinach baked into the center to take away.  We had a spectacular view from our little hill and we used the stone map wall as a wind shield.  Best picnic ever.  

In case you were wondering - men really do wear kilts in Scotland.  I was not able to get a shot to find out what he had on under it.

I'm married to a bad boy....

 Someone at the bakery recommended this castle ruin and said, "They fenced it off but the thing's been there for hundreds of years and it will be fine for a hundred more..."  So of course we hopped the fence thinking that we were really cool.  We were practically sneaking around the first crumbling wall as if we didn't want to be seen when we realized that there were about 15 other people back there who all did the same thing.  We weren't so cool after all.

Dinner in Plockton

We are in Kyle of Lochalsh in a beautiful guest house right on the water with mountains across the way.  The weather is constantly changing - one minute the sun will poke out and the next a dark cloud will roll over the mountain and drop it's rain....then the wind will blow it aside and the sun might peek out again....

We drove on a single track road over to Plockton for dinner.  The road was narrow and twisty and we kept ourselves ready to move over for any oncoming cars.  What we were not expecting to see were some hairy cows standing still in the middle of the road.  

I don't know the technical name for these beasts but everyone just seems to refer to them as hairy cows (even though the ones with horns must be bulls).  I was close enough to style that hair as Bill nudged past this one in the car.  Lucky for us these animals were pretty placid and didn't mind being gentley edged off the road by a Vauxhall.  

The babies were especially cute.  Can we keep him??

 It was a beautiful ride and this was waiting for us at the end.  

We are one with the Scots

 Catching up after being without internet service last night.  It was our first night in Scotland and we made it to Ardgour.  It's a gorgeous Scottish town on the western part of the country.  You have to take a ferry to get there "quickly" or you can drive 40 miles around the mountains.

During cigar time last night around midnight I got talking to some locals.  A few fun facts I found out:
* We stayed at the only place with a pub for 14 miles.  If you get banned from the pub, which some locals have been, you're screwed.
* There are really only two places to work.  The hotel or the fish farm.  The fish farm is the salmon farm that sits right outside the hotel.
* The cook from the hotel pub grew up here, moved to Bristol for 13 years but came back because he loves Western Scotland.  That said, he's angry because the owners of the hotel will not let him cook anything besides the traditional haggis, venison Scottish meals.  He's decided he will leave during the winter and live in Thailand on his own as a beach bum
* There is a czech girl who waits on tables.  She's 22 and came here to go to school.  She is one of only a couple of females.  She is dating Ben, the 21 year old virgin of Ardgour.  Ben is very shy, I was told. The Czech girl is wordily, I'm told.  Either Ben will get the education of his young life or he will blow it with the Czech girl, so says the chef, who seemed far to involved in their relationship.  I think the chef has a crush on the Czech girl.  Which makes sense since there are not other girls on this semi-island
* One guy, couldn't understand when he said his name, works his father's farm.  Chases sheep around and shoots deer.  He told some cool stories about climbing the mountain to chase a wayward sheep and being helicoptered in to shoot deer.  We agreed that he and I would not do well exchanging jobs.