Tuesday 23 August: Over the sea to Skye

Leaving Drymen, we drove up the west bank of Loch Lomond. Again the weather was unkind, and what would have been magnificent scenery in good weather was just dull and grey.

The road passes through the legendary valley of Glen Coe, scene of a treacherous massacre hundreds of years ago. Glen Coe is a valley some 16 or 17km long, fringed with high mountains and with lots of streams and small waterfalls. It is a scene of incredible, almost mystical beauty, but unfortunately the weather was still against us. If the weather improves in the next few days we will go back to try and get some good photographs.

We went the "short" way to Skye, from Mallaig on the mainland to Armadale on Skye by way of a car ferry. This was where the fun started...

We had identified a lovely looking B&B called Ardmorn and arrange for our travel agent to book it for two nights. When we arrived, it was nothing like the image on the website. A dirty grubby little house up the end of a narrow track in the totally wrong part of the island! We were greeted by three dogs, but there were no humans about. So we decided to blow our deposit and find something more suitable.

To cut a (very) long story short, it turns out there are two Ardmorn B&Bs on Skye - the one we thought we had booked is at Dunvegan on the west coast. The other is near Armadale on the Sleat peninsula. The Dunvegan Ardmorn was booked up, so we spent the next several hours trying to find a place in a reasonable location, reasonably priced, and - most of all - available. We ended up in a rather nice place called Benview in Staffin - up on the north-west tip of Skye.

From what we saw driving through Skye today, the place has some really spectacular scenery. We just hope that the weather will clear tomorrow so we can get a look at it. But it doesn't look too promising - it's still raining heavily, and gales are forecast during the night.