I woke after another poor nights sleep, feeling pretty exhausted and my leg was feeling pretty bust. Luckily this was due to be the worst weather of the week and so I decided to spend the day taking it relatively easy on Skye, but would hopefully take a bike round round the Quiraing.
I set off for Skye. The weather was dank, damp and grey - a bit like my mood. I decided to stop in Portree to go to the Whisky Emporium, see if I could find a good bookshop and have a coffee and a cake somewhere. However, I realised that I'd left my wallet at the hostel.... Luckily I managed to scrape together a few quid from under my car - enough to pay for petrol and get myself a sandwich from the co-op. I did find a decent book shop though and took a note of a couple of interesting looking books.
I then set off on the way to Quiraing stopping at a couple of sites along the way - along with a number of coaches full of American/Chinese tourists.
When I got to the Quiraing I spent about 30 minutes umming and arring about whether to do the ride. Eventually I ended up taking a nap instead and then continued on in the car through Uig and back round down to the Sligachan Hotel where I stopped to look at all the whiskies (over 300), have a cup of tea and take a good look in the Sligachan museum (which awakened quite an interest in the origins of British Moutaineering)
I then headed back to the mainland where the weather brightened - along with my mood and I settled on parking on the Killilan Estate and having a very genteel and pleasant ride along Glen Elchaig. The Aberdeen cows provided stubborn resistance to my domination of the road and a buzzard provided the illusion of being a Golden Eagle, for a while anyway.
Then back to the hostel for some pasta and a whisky with a couple of hostel companions (Mike a young guy who had hitched from Germany and Rob a senior, well spoken chap from Edinburgh).
I realised my leg probably wasn't going to be any good the following day either so I decided I'd stick to another bike ride and following the suggestion from Mike I decided to do the pathway alongside the Sligachan river. I'd heard it was quite a technical route, but he said that it was essentially a land rover track, and said it should be pretty easy.
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