RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN RAIN

Got the message ?  The Isle of Skye is just incredible . . . too bad we didn't see a thing thanks to the rain and clouds and fog and mist and did I mention RAIN!
We arrived on Skye via a weird ferry that was on a round table so that when it landed next to the ramp it could rotate to let the landing barge drop so the cars can load and un load. There is a bridge to Skye as of 2002 but we on the bus chose to take the ferry which entailed driving on some pretty awesome one lane roads to get to and from the landing spots. Skye is one mess of volcanic mountains that you have to be insane to drive around on. Add to that the fact that you are driving in fog so thick you can't see, it made for an interesting day. Thanks to the expert driver of our mini bus we did great but really missed all the beautiful Skye panorama. But we had great fun anyway. We stopped in Skye's capitol city of Portree which has  a rousing population of 1,500 people and one street with shops on it. There actually was a building to house the police, unlike another town we drove through that had a sign saying "POLICE" on a private home. Skye seems to consist of tourists, sheep and an occasional fuzzy cow. It seems that the cows in this area of Scotland have long hair and horns and are quite fuzzy and gentle. We didn't get the opportunity to see any up close and personal so we'll have to take Allen's word for it. Allen is our driver and tour guide and seems to find Ger quite amusing. Ger is sitting right up front so he and Allen can exchange side remarks now and again. The other 12 people on the bus have no idea what all the chuckling is about nor do they seem to care. We have quite an international group on this trip. We 3 Americans, a single mother and her 8year old daughter from Australia, a single woman traveling alone who is also from Australia. There are the 2 young women from China, a female teacher from Switzerland who has left her family for 3 weeks to do a practice teaching in Edinburgh, a  young couple from Iran who are heading to Boston to live and a mother and grown daughter and son from Brazil. The language barrier isn't too bad because most speak fair English with the exception of the Brazilian mom.
So our trip to Skye was a bit disappointing but we did make a few wet stops and took some very wet pictures. The bus was warm and cozy so we were pretty content to just sit back and sleep on our way to tonight's stop at Loch Ness. We are now snugged into our B&B after filling our bellies at the pub and ready to get some sleep before our boat ride on Loch Ness in the morning. Hoping the rain will stop so we can see something on the lake and on our way back to Edinburgh tomorrow night.
Would you like a quick lesson in Gaelic? It seems that many of the Irish came to settle Scotland all those years ago so the Highlands of Scotland had adopted the Gaelic language. Skye speaks mostly Gaelic with some sort of garbled English as a second language. All of the signs are written in both languages and neither are understandable. It seems that the rivers and lakes in Scotland are key to the naming of everything else. We have LOCH NESS for example. NESS is the name of the lake and LOCH is the word for lake. GLEN is the word for valley so the valley town would be called GLEN NESS. The word BEN means mountain so we would have BEN NESS if there were a mountain here and so on. We have learned that the word for cow is COE and the word for rain is RAIN!