Scottish Highland Weekend

Where to begin...we started the weekend by missing our flight and heading out for a 10 hour drive to the Highlands of Scotland at 2:00pm. With the major bumps out of the way our trip was great. We drove by Edinburgh and through Glasgow and past almost every loch (lake) in the Highlands. It was absolutely beautiful in the hills, with all the little winding roads along the loch sides, speckled with castles and old stone houses. Mat swears he's going to come back some day with a kayak and spend a week or two paddling around the huge lochs. We spent our first night in Fort Williams, a quaint little harbor town alongside a loch. We then continued north to Skye at 9:00 in the morning after a full Scottish breakfast; beans, fried tomato, bacon, sausage, egg, toast, and tea. We drove through one of the prettiest series of valleys any of us has ever seen, through winding gorges covered in green grass and with streams tumbling over rocky beds, through meadows and down waterfalls. We passed an old rock crofters hut at one point.
Skye is a beautiful island in the Highlands of Scotland, a bridge connecting it to the mainland was built in 1995. It was breath taking! After being in the flat farmland for the past 3 months it was nice to be somewhere that looks like the foothills of the Cascades. It rained off and on the whole time we were there, but we are use to that.
We then spent Saturday evening at our friends wedding, which was in a castle (Eilan Doonan (?sp?)). Mat eat and enjoyed Haggis stuffed chicken, in his defence he didn't know until after he finished it. Her wedding cake was a carrot cake smothered with caramel and chocolate. Most of the men wore kilts (Mat briefly considered buying a kilt in his ancestors, Macalister Clan, tartan but reconsidered when he found out they cost more than $500) and there was a bagpiper.
On Sunday we went to the northern most tip of Skye for some locally produced and hand-dyed yarn (dyed with organic traditional materials). It was an hour and a half drive across the island and by the end we were driving down an 8 foot wide road through tiny village after village where you had to pull off the road any time a car came in the other direction. The women who owned and ran the yarn shop was American, but had been there since the 70's. I bought a ton of yarn and have no idea what I'm going to make with it. On our way back down to the Midlands we stopped and walked around Stirling Castle (the castle of Robert The Bruce of Braveheart fame as well as the castle of the Scottish Stewart kings). It was the neatest castle we've seen so far high above a broad farm valley on a rocky promonotory with expansive buildings and a series of walls and keeps. You could see across the valley to the large Wallace Monument Tower dedicated to William Wallace.
The Highlands and Skye are the most beautiful places in the UK! Mat and I are trying to figure out why more people don't live there. We would relocate there if we could for the remainder of our stay!
After the yarn we headed southeast to Loch Ness and searched for Nessie, Lily swears she saw it! See if you can spot it in our pictures.
We love and miss you all,
Taylor, Mat and Lily