SkyeWalker

Just saw a field of ducks and bunny rabbits hanging out together. This means two things: that bunnies are great and that it has been raining so much that ducks have flocked to the grassy hills of DRA.

But that's okay because I have been at the Isle of Skye all weekend! We left on Friday at 4 and drove straight to the hostel, only stopping for some fish & chips. The place we stayed at was awesome - very clean and quirky. It was called the "skyewalker" hostel and had a bunch of star wars things all over the walls. For example, here is a picture of Darth Vader which they have clad with some nice tartan pants [I say pants here in the british sense, meaning underwear. We learned this weekend that saying you've got "crappy pants" is a big mistake!!]

The hostel also had things like a human sized chess board, an igloo-like "sun dome" outside where there were benches and a zen garden, a picture of the mona lisa that turned into a terrifying skeleton when you moved away from it, etc.

On Saturday a group of us did a walk to Loch Coruisk. They said that it was a "low-medium" walk because it was pretty flat, but it went for a long time. By long time they meant 21 km, and it is fortunate that I decided not to do that conversion in my head because that is 13 miles and that is a lot of hiking. But! The hike was absolutely incredible. The weather was beautiful and honestly I have never seen so many rainbows before in my life. We also got to hang out with some sheep and some big stags, and I took too many pictures of them both in typical tourist fashion. Anyway, the route was flat for about 5 miles, and then the last mile or so went up to get a great view of the loch. Then we walked around the top of it for a while and headed back the way we came, getting in after a 7 hour day. Here are some pictures from the hike:

That night we were served a delicious curry by gracious members of breakaway. We also had some sweet dessert that was basically cake with sugar goo on it now and i forget what they called it, probably some sort of "pudding." I have to say though that I am sort of confused what puddings are because I asked someone about "black pudding" at a fish & chips shop and that is apparently some sort of sausagey blood goop that has congealed. That is not exactly the definition he gave me but it sounded sort of like that. It is confusing to me because it is not a dessert and also I can't see why anyone would eat it.

Anyway, that night was full of games, guitar, and talking, as all the nights proved to be. Everyone was pretty laid back and it was fun to get to meet some new people. The next morning the clocks changed but we chose to ignore that, and just pretended that when we woke up at 8:30 it was still actually 7:30. I decided to do the hike that went by some old castle ruins and then up to something called the "Quiraing" which is a really interesting group of rock formations on the top of Trotternish Ridge. The hike to the castle was really just a pit stop and I had already seen it last week, but that was alright. The hike to the Quiraing was a little bit more difficult, mainly because the weather was pretty awful. It was raining and hailing on us for a good amount of the day and was very windy, which was not good because we had to scramble up a lot of slick rocks. But the hike definitely did not disappoint. Clara and I moved pretty slow on the rocks because we were a little nervous but the view from the top was incredible and the rock formations were all really impressive.

We had a little more time that night to enjoy ourselves, and after eating burritos we had a breakaway quiz night and dined on bananas foster. The next day we woke up pretty early to get all of our stuff together and clean up the hostel. In hopes to get back early, I decided to join a group doing a little hike in one of the small coastal towns on the mainland. The town was seriously too cute I could have barfed, and the weather was the best of the whole trip - sunshine and blue skies. I am getting lazy so I won't say any more and I'll just show ya some more pics

Eep! It was really an incredible weekend and I will remember it for a long time! Now I am off for France though (leaving approximately 30 minutes) Yikes. Almost April, can you believe it??

Au revoir!!! :)