Sky(e) Go

First night holiday rules dictate that we all go out and extremely drunk, we failed at this however as our eyes were bigger than our bellies and we had a massive meal which made us all stuffed and Cederic (aka Stuart) was barely awake at the table, although this may have to do with him being up until 5am the previous night.

We had a few drinks and then got a taxi back. Luckily Cederic speaks Scottish as neither Mark or Martin had a clue what the taxi driver was on about, we think he may have been drunk. We had a night cap back at the hotel which comprised of some single malt.

An early(ish) start the next day as we wanted to catch the Grand Prix, but it wasn't a good start. Firstly there wasn't any hot water in the shower, so we all smell now (I know, I know, we all normally smell any way - haha). But the biggest problem was that when we got to the pub for breakfast, the F1 wasn't on BBC - not a problem, Sky Go will sort us out via the Wifi, or it would if the stupid Wifi hasn't stupidly blocked the stupid F1. We attempted to get our own back on the restaurant by eating too much breakfast from the buffet, we showed them!

We checked out and went to Stirling Castle, which was quite impressive but the locals wanted to charge £15 each for us to have a look around so we just skirted around the outside and Martin took some pictures up a mans kilt. It was then time to go to a sweet shop that we found, between us we spent over £20 on sweets, Mark was very happy that they had a good selection of giant strawberry cables.

Stirling was soon behind us and we headed along the scenic route to the Isle of Skye, Cederic had planned the route and it was very pretty. Due to the lack of snow on the roads, we took some options to provide us with even better views but this did mean that we came across a little snow. It turns out that it was quite a lot of snow and after about 4 miles of going up a hill, the car got stuck several times (once in a ditch and another time in snow that nearly went above the wheels). Mark and Cederic both had fold up shovels, justifying their purchase which was mocked by many at the time.

All in all it took about an hour to dig the car out and to get to the summit, front wheel drive diesel Golf's aren't designed for mountain climbing and we're quite sure that the clutch was on it's last legs. To put it in context the road we went up was good enough to sledge down and we were the only people to attempt going up it.

Coming down the mountain was a little easier, although there was a close call when a deer jumped out in front of the car about 10 meters in front before bounding down the hill showing us how it's done. When we got to the bottom we found several herds of deer at the road side who were probably mocking us the whole time.

We then briefly visited a Dam which looked like it should be part of a James Bond set, and we stopped here for a late lunch and got some energy back.

The next part of the journey involved fast empty single lane roads around the mountains, everyone was a winner here, Cederic and Martin both got to take lots of photos, and Mark got to drive fast. We stopped several times for photos involving an old castle, an eight foot icicle and some horses dressed as highland cattle.

There was one other stop where we had to say goodbye to one of Cederic's ornaments. Before we left we took his balsa wood ship that he'd built and had spent most of the journey finding a fitting loche to sail it on. We decided upon the imaginatively named Loch Lochy and to make sure it had a good maiden voyage, we set it on fire and then threw rocks at it. It died.

Some hours later we arrived at our hotel on the Isle of Skye, it turns out that it's actually a pub which we now have keys to, things could get messy. The chef is good though, we all ordered the steak pie and when one was put on the table, it was so large that we thought we were all sharing it, but it turns out we had one each. We're not convinced that the steak wasn't actually  Shetland Pony but it was bloody gorgeous!