bonnie scotland

Aye bonnie scotland! my home sweet home.... Where did we leave off... ah the tour. We're on day four of the tour now, tomorrow is our way back to edinburgh, sad to leave it's been tooons of fun. All told there are just under 20 of us on the tour, the first day it was less and then we merged with a 7 day tour when we reached skye, but i'm ahead of myself. We began with a crrrazy tour guide named Ewan McCleod, great name no? he lives up to it, he described many a bloody battle and crazy clan chief our first day. We made a million quick stops the first day, including Loch Ness(alas no nessie), a number of fabulous castles, something else very famous i'm forgetting... but we pushed all the way up to the isle of skye our first night. The hostel was tiny and adorable, we stayed there two days, hanging out by the peat fire at night, running about during the day. If there is one thing i can say about scotland....everything is a wee dodgy hike up hill.... aka a nice little scramble(15 minutes or so) straight up slippery rock....but beautiful.

We met the rest of our tour and duncan 'shep' shepard at the begining of our second day. He too, pretty funny, lots of fun. There is a good deal of singing on the bus, everything from historic songs about jacobites to a little bon jovi.....

second day we climbed a lovely mountain called quarang i think.... some wee precipitous cliffs, but no one fell.... also, sheep everywhere, most notably around evvery historic monument, which is hilarious....today we saw really nice standing stones....in the middle of a sheep pasture...and we played a bit of soccer with them as the goal ;)

anyway, many lovely things second day as well, although we were soaked through after the hike, which put a little damper, literally, on it

yesterday most notably we saw the castle at the end of monty python, as well as faerie glen(beautiful), and the sight of the massacre at glencoe, pretty but a sad story behind it, lots of downtrodden highlanders....

today we did some castle storming, loads of fun as well as the aforementioned standing stones, and the sight of the crowning of ancient scottish kings....

tomorrow after the tour we'll be spending the night in edinburgh, and then i'll be heading off directly to meet erin... very excited, but sad to leave mike and wee bonnie scotland, i could spend a lot of time here..... sunny time if i had a choice ;) Love you and miss you all....