First priority of the day: obtain carrots. Why? Because if you stop at Hector’s highland coos to see yourself a hairy coo, they love carrots! According to one google reviewer, that is. And so far, google reviewers have not steered us wrong. So we picked up a bag of carrot sticks (and snacks) and headed north to hopefully see the cows.
We were in luck: there was one mama and one wee young cow in the field! And just as Arielle reached into her bag for the carrots, the young cow trotted over extremely quickly. Yessss. Thank you, previous tourists, for training this coo to come running for carrots.
We were soon blessed with many kisses by his rough tongue as we fed him carrots, and we got to pet his fluffy head. He was so sweet and is our new best friend!
Of further import, today, we have finally named the car: Margarine You Dumb Bitch (“You Dumb” being the car’s middle name, and Margarine being pronounced marge-uh-reen so it’s a name but also a condiment). The GPS voice always spooks us, she tried to lock me out once, the auto wipers are decidedly erratic, and the car beeps too aggressively when things are not REALLY that close (like I have INCHES of room, come on), so we decided it was just a belligerent and anxious spirit trapped in the car.
But to cinch the full title, there is some weird thing we keep doing to invoke the digital assistant feature, sometimes in the middle of conversation, and sometimes when I tap my hands on the wheel to music. When we do this, the car invariably goes “sorry, I didn’t catch that” and we end up trapped in a conversation loop with Margarine trying to get her to shut up so the music comes back.
We didn’t really figure out the tapping cue, but we did learn (while stuck in Construction Purgatory for an hour, see the end of the post) that saying “Hey Mercedes” is what triggers the assistant. I guess it’s our accents?
Portree was our first stop for lunch and to walk around – it’s a small, quaint tourist town with a compact city center that was 75% souvenir and craft shops and the rest were restaurants. The harbor had some brightly-painted houses huddled around it as you descended the streets. Tourist catnip, if there ever was some.
We got lunch in one of the little cafes – a photogenic latte and masala eggs on toast – before we headed out for our scenic drive around the Trotternish peninsula.
The Trotternish peninsula loop is the main tourist loop on Skye: going north from Portree and around a scenic peninsula filled with all kinds of waterfalls, volcanic rock formations, and cliffs. About 2/3 of it is a one-lane two-way road with passing pull-offs. This isn’t too bad to navigate with few tourists, but this road is one that really throws off my sense of the left side of the car. Arielle has to beep like a proximity alarm a lot to warn me I am getting too far left, so I never fell off the road.
I discovered on this shit-ass road that I’ve become really good at dodging potholes on purpose. We refer to them as Craigs and no explanation can be given as to why. They are just Craigs.
The first stop is Bride’s Veil falls, which was not on our map but we saw other people stopped, so we stopped too.
Then, the Old Man of Storr. It’s a bit of tall, pokey rock that juts out from the rest of the cliff, and you can do a 45 minute one-way hike up to it. We did not hike up to it, but we stopped for a tea and stared at it. About 20 minutes after we stopped, we could see it was being pummeled by rain. Poor fools walking to the old man.
I didn’t understand parking or geography so you don’t get the iconic side view of the old man, but how about a verrry zoomy picture of it?!
After the Old Man is the Lealt Ravine, which used to be home to a salmon fishery. The seals were the enemies of the fishers, since they’d go up to the nets and take fish – I mean, free meal. Go seals! The remains of the huts are down on the beach in the ravine. There are plenty of signs posted saying not to walk down to the beach, but a lot of people must do that anyway, since there’s a well-worn path down there. We are most interested in the sheepies.
Kilt Rock is next on this tour. And guess what….it’s a rock that looks like a kilt! You can see layers of basalt on top of layers of sandstone. It’s got a gorgeous waterfall next to it, too. It was not horribly windy, so we didn’t hear the alleged entrancing sound it makes, but the view was so good that it didn’t matter.
Shortly after Kilt Rock and up the road a ways, you can turn left to get to the Quiraing. It’s another rock formation that you can park and hike to. This is the beginning of our encounter with one-lane two-way roads: it’s kind of shitty, lots of Craigs, and there are frequent pull-off points to let someone pass. Because a lot of the people on this road are tourists, everyone is morons, so a lot of backing up ensues so people can pass.
It’s also 15% grade up the mountain, which is a bit anxiety-inducing in the parts that don’t have a railing.
But we made it! Up on the mountain, it’s unsurprisingly very windy, and you have a beautiful sweeping view of the valley, the demon road, and the cool landslide rocks. You can hike out to it (nah, but also because it’s getting later) and in high season, there’s a coffee stand up here.
The rest of the Loop after the Quiraing is more crappy one-lane road, but this section is in better shape than the Quiraing road. We saw lots of sheepies, few people, and plenty of sweeping coastline as we slowly meandered on. The speed limit is like 60 but I think I topped out at about 40. I cannot imagine anyone tearing through this road at 60.
It was at this point in the loop that Arielle decided she wanted to try to pet a sheep. Google told us sheep like carrots. Perfect bait.
There were a bunch of sheep in the road, so why not try? I slowed down, she pulled the carrot out, and the sheep refused and just kept going. So she threw the carrot in the sheep’s general direction, hoping someone would eat it. No sheep stopped.
We are going to be kicked out of Scotland on the basis of sheep harassment.
We left the scene quickly. I hope someone eats the evidence.
Our final stop on the northern loop around Trotternish was at some traditional huts, which are part of a museum that closes at the end of September. You don’t get to go inside, but you can go up and look at the little huts. I love folk museums so I was medium sad I didn’t get to go inside any. Oh well. Driving this road in high season would be a nightmare.
Back in Portree: tonight we got our first sit-down dinner! We stopped at a small inn and I got a noodle dish that had absolutely no salt added to it, so I was really happy. It had one ton of garlic on it though, so I am safe from vampires for the next few days. We shared a traditional dessert, a cranachan, which had good boozy whipped cream. Yum!
On the way back from Portree, about 10 minutes south of town, and precisely at 7:02 PM, we rolled up to this evil road construction sign:
What does timed access mean? There is another sign that says “only follow convoy vehicle.” So we waited. And waited. And watched the line grow and grow. And we had really terrible signal so no internet even to help us figure out how to navigate the situation.
We eventually shut off the car and befriended fellow impatient, stuck motorists, who walked up to the one construction worker and heckled him about how long exactly were we going to be stuck there? We met:
- A Chinese tourist who did her damned best to persuade and cajole the iron-willed Scotsman to maybe find the convoy vehicle sooner PLEASE (she was unsuccessful)
- An English guy who was working at a university in Glasgow and still had to drive down there tonight with a van full of fellow labmates (meaning he’d arrive around 1am now!)
- A Scottish lady with a cute dog, and we pet the dog
- Some other person in a puff vest who said they were gonna turn around (where will you go? There are like 3 roads on Skye) but they didn’t
I was just beginning to plan an insurrection with the other motorists (we decided us Americans had to lead it and I promised to throw out the tea everyone had as a warning shot to the construction workers) when Cute Dog Lady reported back and said that the “timed access” bit meant at the top of the hour. GREAT.
Cute Dog Lady also seemed like a local, and she said the only other way around (in pitch dark) was an hour on shitty one-lane two-way roads so….I will just live here now I guess.
Since we were the very first car, I spent the remaining 20 minutes of our purgatory informing other people who walked up front what exactly the dealio was, while we sat in the dark and our phones strained for signal and Arielle took some spooky dooky red-lit photos of us.
My wee bladder filled and I contemplated how much I cared going to pee in a nearby bush with all the construction lights shining on us, but at just after 8, we were FINALLY released from our construction purgatory. I was really not looking forward to driving the winding Scottish roads in pitch dark, but here we are. We got home just before 9 and I ran to the bathroom as quickly as I could.
We tried to re-train the car to respond to “hey Margarine” instead of “hey Mercedes” but it totally refused to do that.
Rude, Margarine, You Dumb Bitch. Rude.