“I told your dad, ‘Well, at least he didn’t go off the deep end,'" Kiera, the Irish woman at the bar told me.
“He has!” My dad responded.
“But it’s not like he’s gotten into trouble or nothin,” she continued.
“He has!” My dad insisted.
“Well, at least the two of you are still close,” she laughed.
We had been drinking at the bar in Portree and playing pool with the locals on our last night on the Isle of Skye. The rest of our time we went to the Old Man of Storr, went to this little dinosaur museum, hiked to the edge of the isle seeing the northern islands of the Hebrides in the distance amongst the view of purple-hazed-heather, did the Castle at Dunvegan, and wandered a couple miles through crowded paths to the Fairy Pools.
“Once we had some beautiful spots on the river, then about 20 years ago or so, someone decided to go and name them ‘The Fairy Pools’ or some such nonsense, for the tourists,” an old Scotsman at the bar said.
I preferred Islay to Skye, but I love the steep and rugged coastal range that dominates the skyline of Skye. The land has been much less tamed than Islay, but it feels rather barren, and the only forests are farms for profit. The sight of dead trees is a common one in Scotland, but many regions of Skye felt a little like the Lorax.
But anyway… onto the East!
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