Day 3: The Road to Skye

I want to describe our trip from Glascow to Skye which took us about 8 hours with all our stops. I’m afraid though, that more than anything I’ve ever seen before, I have no words suitable for description of this place.

I’ve seen pictures before. I’ve seen movies, and car commercials. But in person, I was unprepared for the majesty of Scottish land. The night before we left for Skye, my brother and I stayed up late, assuming we would have many hours of car ride ahead of us to sleep the next day.

This “car ride” has been the most amazing part of my experience so far.

Despite the pictures, despite the Ford commercials, despite having spent at least 16 hours of my life viewing New Zealand via Lord of the Rings, I never really believed a place like this existed anywhere on earth. ‘Shocking’ is not an adjective usually used to describe beauty, landscape least of all. Truly, though, if I’d had my hands on my cheeks I probably would have fit right into Home Alone most of the trip. I couldn’t take my eyes off the land.

The trip yielded thin, winding roads snaking around small mountains up the emerald peaks. Around them, the plains were filled with bodies of water too immense for me to feel comfortable calling them ponds. We pulled over at Loch Loman, the largest Loch in Scotland. There, the sun and vibrantly clear sky turned the water a deep blue with its reflection. In front of us, was Ben Loman, one of the largest mountains in Scotland, still surrounded by other mountains, hills, and valleys. The view, as with almost every other view we saw that day, was spectacular. It was of one of these sites that I took my first picture here. Sadly, with the snap of every camera coming into focus, came my sudden understanding that a picture could never express the grandeur of the landscape to any, but only serve as a poor reminder to those who had experienced it before.

After stopping for lunch (the waitress was a very thin and nimble woman, about half my size. It’s true that there are faye in Scotland, and that they are can be quite alluring) the scenery only got more intense as we drove the Glencoe. Hills upon hills upon waterfalls and mountains and plains even more vast, more vibrant, and more plentiful then what had come before.

I have, at this point, emphasized the scenery, I hope! Far more than the roads themselves, though rest assured the roads will be long in my memory, cars throughout the UK are much smaller than in America. Gas is also far more expensive (likely not an unrelated fact). When gas hit $2 a gallon in the US, I almost cried. If a Scots had come to America, they would probably cry too, but tears of joy. Try $6.80 a gallon, that’s about the average I’ve seen here. Good thing the scenery is so nice to walk through I guess.

In any case, because the cars are smaller, the roads are also smaller. Curly mountain roads, of course, they make as thin as they can manage. So picture driving down lanes that are roughly half the size you’re used to, with cars, trucks, and buses coming towards you at high speeds from the wrong side of the road. To make things worse, you’ve got stone walls, steep drops, and other rough terrain to the other side of you. You may understand, then, why I do not fault my father for the frequency with which our wheels found unpaved road, or the side of the car was violently brushed by roadside hedge. Having a mack truck pop from around the bend at you, barreling down at you from what your first instinct says in your lane, will do that to you. I think the constant adrenaline rush as much as the lack of sleep caused for my father’s weariness when traffic cleared away to solitude.