Day 50: Feeling cross and Applecross

The cabin is a disappointment. Lots of attention to the wrong sort of detail. Nick-knacks of fat bathing belles about the place and dirty sinks, cracked window panes and cobwebs. Definitely not up to the usual standards. To add insult to injury, there is a notice on the gate as you come in offering cabin accommodation for just £20 per person. I have had to pay three times that price per night by the time Airbnb have added their mark-up. I am not a happy bunny and I have said so in my review. 

Air bnb can be tricky when it comes to currency as well. The Swiss couple I met at Paul’s house were similarly disenchanted when they realised that the company played tricks with currencies: Swiss francs converted to Euros and then pounds and charged every step of the way. Never mind.

Only one more night and tomorrow I will go over to Skye to stay with Harish and his wife Clemencia for a couple of days. I met Harish as a client, and did a swap with him for an Enneagram analysis. At the time they were living in St. Leonards on the Sussex Coast but just in time for me, they went to live on Skye. Quite a radical step and I am looking forward to finding out how it has been thus far.

Today, no telephone signal and no wifi at all so I read a novel until I was summoned to the cabin door by someone knocking. Thinking it might be my host I opened the door to find I had a guest.

She made me think about having a very late breakfast and setting off for Applecross. Had I known what the journey would have been like, I may have had a duvet day instead.

What did I know about it?

Several people had recommended that I go.

It has a pub that has won best restaurant food in Scotland year on year and yet was still affordable. It has a heritage centre and an old abbey.

Oh yes and you get to it on the highest road in Great Britain.

Now I consider myself a brave person. Marianne my sister and I walked along a foot wide path 600 foot up a 1200 foot sheer cliff in South Africa with our friend Jenny because she thought we could manage it. Manage it we did but privately Marianne and I thought it was the most dangerous thing we had ever attempted (now you know Jen!).

This was similar. It was raining. I was not driving my own car but a borrowed one with a difficult to find second gear and a dodgy handbrake. It all started off alright.

Until I came across this warning sign.

Sadly folks I chickened and went the long way round. The VERY long way round. It took two and a half hours to get there. I did go through a couple of nice little towns, Lochcarron being one. It had a couple of shops, a string of pretty white houses with roses rambling round the doorways, a lot of small sail boats on the water and a wonderful golf course on the edge of the loch.

Not much else. Sheep crossed the road in front of me with no warning, and twice I met Boris’s cousins also untethered and on the road.

It was steep enough and mostly single track. I hoped the famous Applecross was worth the two and a half hours it took to get there. I was overtaken by six Austrian Porsche heading in the same direction. Another foreign car posse.

Eventually I saw Applecross bay...

And then the village itself. It was very small. It had one shop, one petrol pump and a walled garden somewhere but I never found it.

I did find the Applecross pub however.

And being just one person, they found me a tiny table and I had a good fish pie with haddock and hot smoked salmon.

The Porsche drivers had to wait a bit longer. Apparently this is a trip they do twice a year every year. Why? No idea.

It had taken me so long to get there,  I thought that I would risk taking the short way back over the mountains on the highest road in the UK. One the map they refer to it as The Cattle Pass.

They are joking!! Any cattle with half a brain would definitely pass. It was really scary; hair pin bends and big dipper single track roads with blind summits which as you crested them gave you no hint where the road had gone. It had gone down about 40 foot. Would the hand brake hold? Could I find the second gear? 

 I wished I had someone else in the car for the first time on this trip. If Chris Evans does it for Top Gear someone tell him to drive himself. Like him, I am not the best of travellers if someone else is driving. That road was seriously car sick making never mind basic fear.

The sense of achievement 10 miles on when I came down to ground level was enormous. Now I understand how the mad cyclists felt doing the North Coast 500 from Thurso to Durness. 

However, hire car and I managed it together. Result.

Got back to find the chicken waiting for me with her mate. 

As I got out of the car they both strutted up to the radiator grill and started pecking at the insects splattered there. They’ve obviously done this before.