Today it was time to leave our lovely seaside Inn and head for a tiny village called Duirinish. This village is so small that most locals in and around the Gairloch area really didn’t know where we were going. We took the “long” way through Torridon, which was a cool seaside village similar to Gairloch. Here’s a photo of the route:
Torridon was a pretty sweet place. There was a fun little general store where we bought some souvenirs for some of you lucky folk. We also went for a bit of a stroll to look for some birds. GMac spotted a sweet Buzzard (basically a hawk in Scottish, apparently), so I put together a little birding video. I wasn’t able to get great video of it, but whatever, enjoy it. Or don’t.
https://youtu.be/lHfMgAUwLnc?si=cGjJqrDzRF0qoATp
One thing we’ve seen a few times around here are these “Open Air” churches. I guess people have church outside sometime, or something? Scotland has its own church, the Church of Scotland, which I’m sure you can read about on Wikipedia. Take that, England. Anyway, the walk we did from the general store took us to and around an Open Air church.
Garmin of walk:
https://connect.garmin.com/modern/activity/12153024961
And some photos from the walk:
After our walk, it was time to get back on the road. A coworker and friend of mine, who lived in Scotland for some time, told me that the roads in Scotland are narrow. I can confirm that these roads are narrow. In fact, most roads are so narrow that they are just one lane, and you’re just sort of expected to bail out at these small “passing zones” that can fit maybe 2 cars max when oncoming traffic is approaching. Most of the roads to and from Torridon were like this, and many of the roads we would encounter in the future were like this. While this isn’t particularly difficult or stressful, I will say that I am REALLY glad we aren’t doing these drives during peak tourist season. It would take FOREVER.
Anyway, after a nice drive, we stopped in the sprawling metropolis of Kyle of Lochlash, gateway to the island of Skye. We grabbed some sandwich stuff and had a little picnic up on the Plock, which was a hill just outside the “city”. Here are some views:
^To the Isle of Skye. Don’t worry, we’ll go there and tell you all about it.
I ended up having some special British Hot and Spicy chicken wings that were neither hot nor spicy nor good, as expected. My sandwich was tasty, though. They love chorizo here, for some reason. After eating, we went to grab our mountain bikes from the mountain bike dude who lived in Kyle. We showed up to his place and he helped us get his bike rack on with the bikes. We packed 3 bikes on this thing, as shown below:
The mountain bike dude, like everyone else we’ve encountered on this trip so far, was extremely nice. He told us about several rides we could do nearby, and gave us some maps. He even took the time to step through the maps with us, pointing out certain loops we could do, and what we might see along the way. What a lad. So far, we haven’t broken his bikes, so that’s good.
We drove our laden vehicle the 5 miles to our cabin in Duirinish. Wife booked this fantastic private cabin with access to LAUNDRY, which we all did almost immediately. Remember, we did not check a bag, so that meant it was time for some clean clothes. As we were winding down for the night, the wind and rain really picked up, threatening to doom our mountain bike trip tomorrow…except not really because in Scotland you just hit the trails no matter what because the trails are going to be muddy and wet no matter what.