lambs on the lam

this is the pretty little town we're staying in on the isle of skye: portree. it's right on the coast, and for a tiny town (2,100 residents) it has a lot of restaurants and cafes and things - because a lot of tourists stop here. according to my guidebook, edinburgh is the most visited place in scotland, followed by inverness and then the isle of skye. so basically our whole trip. but there's a reason for that! these are great places to visit! skye is gorgeous…we've done a bit of hiking around the area around portree, with a big walk planned tomorrow.

today we drove from portree to dunvegan castle (not nearly as cool as edinburgh castle) and then to neist lighthouse, in the northwest corner of the isle of skye. more photos of that soon, but the point of today's post is this: to get to neist lighthouse you drive 20 miles on a two lane road, and then turn down a one lane road (one lane! for both directions! there are "passing points" where you pull over to let other cars by) for 9 miles. neist lighthouse - and the view of the outer hebrides from there - was gorgeous, and totally worth the 9 miles on a one lane road, even though i had four mini heart attacks when cars would come flying at us from around a corner and we had to hope that a passing point would emerge in the next 3 seconds (and it always did). my life expectancy has been diminished by a considerable amount because of this drive. good thing dad is a BEAST at driving on tiny winding roads or we would be dead at this point. along this one lane road there were no fences and lots of sheep. LOTS OF SHEEP, i say. they were spraypainted different colors to indicate which farm they belonged to, we think. at several points the sheep were hanging out RIGHT NEXT TO the road, and at one or two points the sheep were in the road. here are some lambs on the lam. we had to stop and wait for them to finish their jaunt and get off the road before we could continue. this is also a good indication of how wide the road was, with a passing point on the righthand side here. you'll also see that all the road signs here are in both gaelic and english, just to confuse me a little more while i'm being the navigator.  (i think you can click on all pictures to enlarge them.)

at another point a farmer lady and her two kids stopped traffic to have their herd of 30 or so cows cross the road.

so basically: if you think you live in a rural area in the united states, you haven't been hanging out on the isle of skye. additionally: if you think you live in a pretty place in the united states, you probably do. but the isle of skye is very pretty, as well. (neist lighthouse, with the outer hebrides islands in the distance.)

(i took the photos of animals in the road...dad took the actual high-quality pictures of portree and neist point.)