Skye was absolutely unreal. I could squeeze all the emphatic celebratory words in my vocabulary into a sentence and they would still fall short of how wild and incredible our weekend in Skye was.
We cancelled out enterprise car (and later, magically also got the return back which is not supposed to happen? Not gonna fight that one) and Matthieu came to chloés flat about 30 minutes after we were planning to leave, so the timing could not have been more perfect. Matthieu added two tents to our collections of sleeping gear and packs. Whereas I am normally a "drive until you get there, you can take your time and explore once we've arrived" person, Matthieu is not and it honestly set the perfect tone to the weekend. We all did our best with small talk, putting a good foot forward in getting to know someone new. I'll be the first to admit that my mind got swallowed by the views, which were incredible.
We made our first stop at a family lake area, loch something.. I can't remember the name but I'll find it later. Chloé and Matthieu caught up in their native tongue while veronica and I laced fingers to wander towards the lake. It was so beautiful and big and clear. Matthieu told us that he had climbed the mountain that stood behind the lake and the view from the peak was apparently incredible. My usual feelings of "c'mon, keep driving" quietly dissipated as I saw the views to which Matthieu was introducing us. Breath taking.
We drove through Glen Coe (glen means valley) and I think the world stopped while our eyes followed the carvings of the mountains. We took in the view for a few minutes and wandered around, glued to the wonder surrounding us.
Our next pit stop was ft. William (where you can catch the Jacobite train, aka the Harry Potter train) we came up with a meal menu for the next day or so and split a massive 5L of water. We pulled over by a castle, the name of which escapes me entirely at this moment. I think time slowed again. I've seen a million sunsets as a standard Floridian, but I've never seen one light up a castle. Once the bats started up, we decided to look for a place to put our tents.
Slowly, I think we all started to realize how compatible our travel group was. "sure" became the response to every "do you want to..." over the weekend. Do you want to stop at Glen Coe and look around? Sure. Do you want to try the tent rather than bother with a hostel? Sure.
Matthieu was all about getting off the beaten path, so the 9£ campsite was insufficient, which I respected. After 10 or so minutes of driving, we decided to just knock on someone's door and see if we could discreetly pitch our tents in their yard for the night. Matthieu later told us stories of him hitchhiking, so he had a bit more experience. He asked us if anyone wanted to join, and obviously I said sure. Lucky for us, no one was home which was close enough to permission for us. So we grabbed our packs and food and climbed a wire fence to pitch our tents near the water. This is where we learned our first Skye lesson.
MIDGES ARE REAL AND THEY ARE EVIL SPAWN OF GNATS AND MOSQUITOS.
They were awful and they were damn everywhere. When chloé mentioned them before, I thought they were just gnats, which are annoying but ultimtalely harmless. NOT with midges. Midges will make you believe in God out of pure desperation for something to stand in opposition to them. In cliff notes, the worst peak time for midges is just after sundown, in tall grass, near water, with no breeze. Check, check, check and check, and man where they unbearable. Not helped by the fact that one of the tents had broken, so we were wrestling with it for about an hour when, overwhelmed by midges, we collectively decided it would be better to sleep in a shanty of a tent using 2 poles instead of properly setting it up with the 3rd pole and the tensioners. The midges swarmed, but most intensely on chloé. It was the saddest thing. She looked like she had chickenpox. And the itchiness of the bites LASTS. At one point, we asked a guy at the nearby gas station how to best deal with midges. He suggested a lighter and a can of hairspray. He also mused that when you kill one, a thousand show up for the funeral. He wasn't wrong.
Next we drove over to the fairy pools after stopping for a couple of breath taking views. Isle of Skye knows what it's doing! It wasn't cold but I wouldn't say it was warm either, but somehow, largely at matthieu's suggestion, we ended of swimming and climbing through the fairy pools. It looked like the scene in Fern Gully where the main characters run across the natural pools, making it impossible to see how wild and beautiful the world can be. And those views! Holy wow! We spent a few hours there, getting out right before the crappier weather settled in. We drove around a bit more, snacking on the combination of lunch items we packed, until we made our way to Portree in hopes of finding housing for the looming rain.
The Isle of Skye is usually pretty busy in the summer (whoops, you're supposed to book several months in advance) and this weekend in particular, Portree was hosting a fiddle and accordion festival. Can't even make that stuff up. So we combed the whole town, asking churches, community centers, baristas, the outdoor store guy, anyone we could find, if they had a roof we could borrow. Didn't need a house, didn't need any attention, just a place to be horizontal for the night. The rain slowly started picking up while we asked for housing, so eventually, after finding an open door to an empty church narthex and a playground with some awnings, we settled for one of those options and took our lunch properly in the time square, in the middle of a light rain.
And that's when a young person saved the day. Katelyn, a high school student asked what we were doing in the rain. We explained our predicament and she told us that her family lived behind a b&b, the owner of which happened to be a good friend of her grandfather. She phoned them up & they had 2 rooms, both fitted with 2 twin sized beds. We almost cried! Katelyn lived close to the b&b so we gave her a ride and gratefully stepped into a beautiful bed and breakfast that offered FREE DELIGHTFUL breakfast in the morning and hot showers. We almost cried.
After we got settled in, we jumped in the car & just started moving in a direction. The scenery was astounding. Our decision making process mostly looked like one of seeing something we found interesting, naming it, and everyone else in the car deciding that yeah, we should check it out. So along the way, we found a lake and a bunch of sheep peppered along its borders. Veronica fell in love with every sheep we saw, which entailed speaking sheep, which was perfect. and THEN we saw a boat. Surely this boat was securely anchored to the shore? Surely someone hadn't left it with rope superficially tethering it to land? Oh wait, no, that's exactly what happened. Matthieu suggested we try it and after I eventually got over my concern of somehow getting arrested/in trouble (c'mon chels, the only living things near you were sheep, hellooooooo) we jumped in and paddled out. It was absolutely surreal. The lake was like something out of a Harry Potter movie; it honestly felt like it was magic. Matthieu and I paddled while veronica and chloé directed the ship. We were motley, but we were out in the middle of a beautiful lake sandwiched between a few mountains, the tendrils of rain clouds slowly moving along their ridges. I think it was as wild as I've ever been. Eventually, the looming rain clouds moved a bit quicker, so we tied up our boat and said thanks for letting us have a ride. We drove back in a drizzle and after we parked our car at the b&b, we made our way to the local bar for a few well deserved drinks over some new card games. It was more perfect than I ever could've imagined.
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