We reached the Isle of Skye yesterday evening via the Skye Bridge. Our accommodation is a tiny “lodge”/hut in a newly-cleared woody area up on the mountainside. There are wee beasties here called midges, which bite your ears, neck, and hands and like to fly up your nose. Our hut has a bathroom and 4 bunks, and just enough room for 3 small suitcases in the entry. And it’s full of midges.

So tonight, after our minibus tour of the  northern end of Skye today (more about that when my phone isn’t about to die), we are sitting in a bar with pots of tea to warm us up. We’ll eat dinner here, and go back to our hut later to kill more midges. Midgies, we call them. We even have a video of them on the backup camera of the rental car, but I can’t post it here.

Skye is starkly beautiful. No crops are grown here commercially. Sheep and cattle are raised. The primary industries are fishing, fish farming, and tourism. What there’s a lot of are tourists, tour buses, water–both fresh and sea–and mountains. The northern part of Skye is pulling away from the southern part of the island at the rate of a millimeter a year. I’ll try to post some pictures on my Jean L. French Facebook page. If my battery lasts long enough!