Despite the cold, rainy weather the night before had turned into, the following morning was bright and welcoming. We took off early and pushed into the furthest point of our trip: the Isle of Skye.

Our fun little rental (thankfully manual!) allowed us to venture a little off the larger M and A roads and explore via the smaller and tighter B roads that cut through Scotland.

The driving on this day was easily my favorite. The landscape, weather, and roads drastically changed every half hour or so. After driving through some properly twisty roads through forests, we briefly stopped for some breakfast at a little town called Ballater before heading off again.

Snow sports are snow sports and I’d happily spend all day on these slopes (especially given the current shutdowns) but driving by these runs makes me thankful I live so close to the Sierras.

This section was a little dicey, with a fairly long stretch of road narrowing down to a single lane and plenty of blind corners.

Eventually though we made it to the Skye Bridge, a simple but vital bridge that connects Skye to the rest of mainland UK. Despite taking longer routes, we still have plenty of time left in the day to explore the area, so we decided to drive around the island and see what Skye had to offer.

Turns out what it offered was probably the most surreal moments of our trip. Isolation is one thing, and the Scottish Highlands offers its flavor of beauty that I’ve never encountered anywhere else, but Skye had a touch of the familiar to me.

Maybe it was the more modern wooden architecture of this community space/cafe we found, but if someone were to explain to me that I were looking at an unmapped section of western America, I could believe them. I knew I hadn’t been to anywhere like this place before, but it didn’t feel alien to me. Or maybe I was just a sucker for the dramatic sky. Either way, after some delicious chocolate cake and coffee, we headed back towards our AirBnB to swing by a nearby attraction with hopes to catch it before it closed.

Of course it’s a castle! There are genuinely so many scattered around countryside that it’s kinda hard to not see one (this was the 2nd we saw today, the first being that white grain elevator looking structure in one of the earlier images). Not many of them look that amazing though, and so despite not being particularly rare in this area, this was still pretty fantasy-looking to us. The sunshine/rain weather that was slamming us helped make things look magical as well. Sadly it had closed up early probably because of the drop in tourist traffic with the COVID epidemic quickly approaching, but it looked great from the shores.

As this wasn’t really an area with many dine-out options and we were pretty tired from the all-day drive, we grabbed some microwavable dinners at the local market and headed to our tiny little AirBnB shed. It was clearly on the small side, but actually a pretty nice place to stay.

After our routine wipe down of all the surfaces, we settled in for an early sleep as tomorrow would be the longest leg of our entire trip. Next stop, Lake District!