turning a new leaf

I went to Mallaig yesterday. The town itself is very small and mostly a fishermen community... There is no castle :( so either my book was complete fiction or the castle has been destroyed in the past centuries.
The train ride there is the one they used for Harry Potter (I've mentioned this before) and the scenery is just wild!!! I saw the bridge (see my new album for visuals), but couldn't make out where the rest of the shots were filmed.

I took a ferry to the isle of Skye, where there is a distillery and a castle :P
Sadly, without a car it's really hard to get around once there. There are very few buses and a taxi to the Talisker distillery would have cost 80 pounds back n forth... :(

So I stayed at the Clan Donald castle for the day. There was plenty to do there anyway, nature trail, museum on the MacDonald clan history, the ruins, the gardens... I saw a million different bird species, including birds of prey, wild ducks, geese and herons, deers, seals, otters (during the ferry ride), and the usual sheep and bunnies (who outnumber humans by 100 to 1 I'm sure!). Wildlife is thriving here! The landscape is so harsh, it makes it harder for humans to mess it all up...

I had my first haggis at the castle restaurant.. believe it or not it's really good!!! Very tasty, lots of spices (not hot, just flavorful)... goes very well with whisky :P

I came back to Fort William after tea (that's dinner to the rest of the world), to find that the sat divers were still here. They went snowboarding during the day and managed to keep their room at the Center until Sunday. I thought it best not to go out that night... didn't want to come face to face with the freak while drunk. It turned out to be a very good move.
I don't know what they ingested (I'm suspecting alcohol by itself wouldn't have yielded such results) but some of them (not just the sat, other guys as well) went completely insane... fighting, walking on a car and bashing it, coming back to the Center screaming, and banging on walls... two of them (in turns) tried to get into Lindy's room (while I was there with her) with crazy look in their eyes... one was pulled back to his room by Jimmy, the other was told to fuck off by Lindy. The screaming and bashing eventually died down but not before a tv was thrown out of a window... mad...

All of them left very early this morning... I wonder why :S
(just to specify, "some of them" does not include Max and Wayne, who are crazy yes, but really great guys, and Jimmy who is a bit of a joke but still a decent bloke...)
All in all, 4 different guys ended up spending a night in jail this week... not the sat guys last night but there might be consequences to their behavior later on. Too many courses finished at the same time.. it had a very bad build up effect...

So that's the end of this chapter... new guys are coming in today; Lindy and me are thinking of sitting in the restaurant with notepads to rate them as they come in... just to be on the safe side ;)
Ho yeah, a new girl arrived to the center last week. Katrina, from Portugal, she is on a 3 weeks course for rov piloting, but not the same as mine. That makes 3 girls at the same time.. an all time record for the place!

I have my first flying session tomorrow FINALLY!!!!!!!!!! *happy happy dance*
Think of me Monday, around 7am (North America time)... I'll be in the saddle, flying the Falcon!!! *more happy happy dance!*