The Isle of Skye. The name alone has a bit of mystic to it. It has a reputation as a place of great dramatic beauty, and this is well warranted. Some areas are flat out spectacular. I rented a Fiat 500 (tiny little car!) in Inverness for four days, and drove down to the Isle…

  I reached Inverness after a 3 ½ hour train ride north from Edinburgh. Inverness is a much less dramatic city than Edinburgh, relatively flat, lying along the banks of the River Ness (which empties Loch Ness). You see quite a number of villages and towns in Scotland that begin with ‘Inver’, because in Gaelic…

Getting into Edinburgh from the airport is easy: you take the Airlink 100 bus outside the terminal (ticket office is there) to downtown. I stepped off the bus, walked 100 meters, and saw this: Saint John’s Cathedral, with the castle looming on the hill in the background. Spectacular. If you like rocky prominances and castles,…

Dublin was my first destination as I started my first summer in Europe. I rented an apartment from AirBnB, which turned out to be in one of the older, run-down sections of Dublin near the Guiness brewery, and my initial impression was not too favorable.     An Irish pub band puts it this way:…