Day Two on Isle of Skye

We have been home for a day now, and we're unpacked and sorted from our short trip to Skye. The second day was a little less eventful than the first...mostly because of the driving rain that came down in sheets all day long. We had a slow start to the morning, and at one point after Emma and I left the cottage to mail some letters at the wee Post Office down the road, we ventured off to an especially lonely section of the island where I was going to let her try to drive on the road for the first time. Though she is sixteen, she doesn't yet have her permit in the U.S., and since the driving age is 18 in the UK, she is way too young to drive here, so that's a problem. The whole drive-on-the-left-from-the-right thing is another complicating factor, but still I was willing to entertain the idea on such a remote island. In the end, though, we both chickened out because the single track road system seems to complicate things, and because the rain created some poor visibility. We left the experience of driving on the road for the first time for a later date in our semester in Scotland, and went home to collect the rest of the family.

We were staying in a holiday cottage in Dunvegan, on the western side of the island. This map below shows only the top half of the Isle of Skye, but aside from the trip out and the trip back, we didn't spend much time in the bottom half.

On the first day, our hike to the Coral Beach took us just a few minutes north of Dunvegan. In this photo you can see the tiny island at the tip of the peninsula between Dunvegan Head and Waternish Point.

On day two, we drove east to Portree, which is the largest town on Skye (about the same population as our hometown of Hamilton, NY). We stopped at a bakery/cafe/art studio (this seems to be a common hybrid on Skye) for "lunch" though the menu was pretty limited and mostly involved sweet baked goods. I'm a bit of a lightweight when it comes to car travel on especially windy, curvy roads, so I wasn't going to be able to endure a scone with jam for lunch, followed by a driving tour of the island. I opted for a black coffee instead. Leah and John, who have stomachs of steel at this point in their lives, each (happily) had a chocolate chip cookie the size of their heads for lunch.

We drove through the harbor of Portree, which is known for its colorful shops and houses (see photo below), then started up the eastern side of the Trotternish Peninsula towards the Storr.

The "Old Man of Storr" hike is one of the many well-known hikes on the island, and it is also one of the shorter ones so I figured it would be good for toddlers. As we unloaded ourselves and our rain gear from the car, the wind started to blow and the rain started to fall. David's parents headed up the hill just ahead of us, and David said he was going to stay back at the car because he suddenly wasn't feeling so well (author's note: he DID have a scone with jam for lunch!). As Leah and John and I started up the trail, David's parents were already on their way down, saying it was way too windy and cold for them. The three of us persevered nonetheless, stopping a few times to readjust our rain gear as the weather got nastier the higher we climbed.

Here are the kids towards the beginning of the hike:

And here they are 20 minutes later, at the first summit:

Doesn't this look fun!?

At this point, we decided to cut the hike short, and we all basically ran the whole way down the hill to the car, where David and his parents were waiting.

We drove north to see the rest of the Trotternish peninsula, and I had a number of sites and short hikes on the day's itinerary in the unpronounceable Kilmaluag and Uig, but with David not feeling well and the weather not cooperating, we decided to cut things short and see what we could by car. Emma and I jumped out at one point, at Kilt Rock, to see the waterfalls, but it was too misty to see much so we just came away with a foggy selfie as evidence that we were there!

By the time we returned home, a few hours later, we were all a little dejected, soggy and car sick. We were also a little low on gas, but there was a small gas station in Dunvegan and I figured that I would drive past it and just go home, since we would need to pass it the next morning on our way out of town. We made it back to the cottage, ate leftovers for dinner, and David and I finished off a bottle of wine while the kids took advantage of the XBox that was set up for guests.

The next morning we packed up and loaded the car, and set off. We stopped in the town to let Emma post some postcards, and David swung in to the gas station. All the unleaded pumps were covered with plastic bags, though, so he went in to ask how to fill up. He came out a few minutes later and said to me that it seemed that they weren't going to have any gas until mid-day. We really didn't want to hang around until mid-day in such a tiny place in a packed-to-the-gills car, so we took reassurance in the indicator on the car dashboard that said we had a 23 mile gas range. We drove off, south, towards the Skye bridge because we knew there were a number of small towns along the way. As we drove, though, the gas range kept dropping and dropping, and a few miles out of town it dropped to 13 miles. At that point, we pulled off the road to use our phones to locate a gas station nearby. Our phones had no service, so we used the GPS on the car instead. It said the nearest petrol station was in Broadford...39 miles away. This was no good! Though we had been discussing this predicament in a hushed voice so as not to alarm the kids or grandparents in the back, they were by now fully aware of our pickle! We reviewed the map and decided that the closest town was Carbost, which we had passed through the day before to buy some scallops for dinner. It was 13 miles away, and the GPS didn't indicate there was a gas station there. I asked the kids if they remembered seeing a gas pump while we were there, but no one could recall one way or the other. We didn't have much of a choice, though, and decided that it would be better to run out of gas three miles from a tiny town than three miles from absolutely nowhere. So, off we went, and David took advantage of every downward slope to put the car in neutral and save on gas. It was completely silent in the car at this point...everyone's eyes were scanning the horizon for signs to Carbost while checking the gas range on the dashboard. At last, the gas range went to zero but the car kept going. After what felt like an eternity, we limped into Carbost. As we rolled into the little post office/souvenir shop/grocery store (this also seems to be a common hybrid on Skye!) we spotted a rusty old gas pump. In the United States, this thing would have been the decor outside a Cracker Barrel meant to evoke images of Americana, but here I was hoping it was the real deal. David popped into the shop and asked if it worked, and he came back out with a huge thumbs up! We were never so happy to pay crazy-inflated island gas prices in our life!

Here's a shot of our saviour gas station! Trust me...it looks MUCH better in a rearview mirror!