Travelling around Skye
Originally written June 11th
Planning your journey to a foreign country almost exclusively through the Internet is always a little bit hit and miss. Now, I wasn't present for the planning of this leg of the trip (and due to time delay due to lack of teh internets, by "this leg" I mean the Isle of Skye), the Internet didn't quite indicate distances well.
Skye is gorgeous, and there IS a lot to see. I'm not contesting that fact. It's just really hard to get around without a vehicle of one's own.
Our hostel here in Armadale, where I'm writing this, is nice enough. The only problem is that it's not really IN Armadale.
It's a forty minute walk.
And I admit, it is along a beautifully scenic view of the harbour... But this journey translates to a two minute car ride. :P
The buses mostly run in association with the ferries, which mean that they run through town four times a day, and not at all on Sundays. We would actually be much better off staying in Broadford, which has more than the three giftshops, one petrol station, and two art galleries in Armadale. Broadford is about twenty minutes by bus away, but almost totally inaccessible to us as pedestrians. Even the local supermarket was one town over, luckily within walking distance, or we would have had to live off of nuts and granola bars until the bus came the next morning at 9am or so. (Breakfast isn't included at this hostel, p.s.).
Still, there's a respectable castle with 20,000 acres of scenic grounds and walking trails (lol, I almost wrote "trials"... but isn't that what they are?), which we shall check out tomorrow. That is, if we feel like walking even more than the one and a half long round trip it takes to walk there.
And on Sunday, we'll get our DRIVING tour of Skye. :)
That will be great, because Sara and I have pretty much lost our tolerance for hills and walking. My legs will be totally spectacular by the end of this trip - all toned and muscular.
I can also now personally appreciate our ancestors' habit of living close to home (living their whole lives within, say, a twenty mile radius of their home village): with only your feet as transport, I don't think that I'd get too far either!
Planning your journey to a foreign country almost exclusively through the Internet is always a little bit hit and miss. Now, I wasn't present for the planning of this leg of the trip (and due to time delay due to lack of teh internets, by "this leg" I mean the Isle of Skye), the Internet didn't quite indicate distances well.
Skye is gorgeous, and there IS a lot to see. I'm not contesting that fact. It's just really hard to get around without a vehicle of one's own.
Our hostel here in Armadale, where I'm writing this, is nice enough. The only problem is that it's not really IN Armadale.
It's a forty minute walk.
And I admit, it is along a beautifully scenic view of the harbour... But this journey translates to a two minute car ride. :P
The buses mostly run in association with the ferries, which mean that they run through town four times a day, and not at all on Sundays. We would actually be much better off staying in Broadford, which has more than the three giftshops, one petrol station, and two art galleries in Armadale. Broadford is about twenty minutes by bus away, but almost totally inaccessible to us as pedestrians. Even the local supermarket was one town over, luckily within walking distance, or we would have had to live off of nuts and granola bars until the bus came the next morning at 9am or so. (Breakfast isn't included at this hostel, p.s.).
Still, there's a respectable castle with 20,000 acres of scenic grounds and walking trails (lol, I almost wrote "trials"... but isn't that what they are?), which we shall check out tomorrow. That is, if we feel like walking even more than the one and a half long round trip it takes to walk there.
And on Sunday, we'll get our DRIVING tour of Skye. :)
That will be great, because Sara and I have pretty much lost our tolerance for hills and walking. My legs will be totally spectacular by the end of this trip - all toned and muscular.
I can also now personally appreciate our ancestors' habit of living close to home (living their whole lives within, say, a twenty mile radius of their home village): with only your feet as transport, I don't think that I'd get too far either!