we have found that email is more time and finance consuming than we would like so i apologise for any delayed or nonexistant responses. we do get to it, just sometimes with a delay.

well, we since i last wrote we spent a couple of days in Bonn and then headed off to London. we spent about a week and a half going broke there before heading to Scotland. Scotland is wonderful. the landscape and weather are like home to us and most all the people we have encountered have been friendly and helpful. i never want to leave (or so i say as i've only got a couple of weeks here.) here are some highlights:

ORKNEY
we spent 5 days in Orkney. Orkney is a bunch of islands just north of the british mainland. the big island in Orkney is called Mainland. this is kind of funny, but i myself just called an island mainland, so it is all relative i supose.

we spent all of our time on the west half of mainland. we spent a day bicycling to an 8000 yr old village (ruins), a slightly younger tomb/ celebration house (midwinter's sunlight shines though the small passageway to shine on the back of the big inner room), and two standing stone circles: one originally had 60 stones, the other 12. i think this was my favorite day. the next day we hitched to a tidal island where there are some younger ruins (viking) and hung out over the cliffs of the atlantic ocean. all the people we met were great, though some of the native Orkadeans were hard to understand. we even got picked up by a family in a minivan. that was the coolest.

Orkney is beautiful and wonderful. it is a place i will definitely return to.

ISLE OF SKYE
we arrived on Skye yesterday. it is typically clouded over and raining. we had very schizophrenic weather including thunder and hail and bright blue skies. we took a walk along the shore for a while and headed up through some cow and sheep pastures. in the distace we could see a waterfall that blew upward when the winds were strong. it was a good 1000 feet or more above us. we ended up hiking (climbing) up to the top. it was amazing! the views were wonderful and we kept gettting sprayed by the waterfall when we were at the top of it. we walked along the ridge for a while before heading back down. i stepped into a bog up to my thigh at one point and got pretty muddy, but i was in such good spirits i could only laugh at myself. despite my muddy legs we ended up getting a ride back into town once we got down to the road. it was a great adventure. when we told some other hostellers about our outing they initially didn't believe us that we had gone all the way up there. this was odd considering there were others up there at other times today as well. we had it to ourselves at the time though!

so that is all for now on Scotland. there is much more i could write and would love to, but time doesn't permit it. we are off to an even smaller island now and eventually back to the real continent to get on a boat for a week in the Netherlands. I will try to keep updated!

until the next adventures...

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