Jura

Well the air bed folded over sort of worked. A bit like sleeping on a wobbly jelly. But it'll do until Friday when we can buy another one from Oban on our way to Mull.

So today we went to Jura and the getting there itself was moderately exciting. The sound between Jura and Islay is something of a tidal race, which seems to be common hereabouts and we could see the water flowing like a strong river, especially close to the Islay bank.

The little ferry only takes about half a dozen cars at a time but it's a powerful little thing and we watched it crabbing its way across the sound towards us. It really was having to point a long way off the way it was heading to get across to us.

Once we'd made our crossing we took the "long road", the only significant road on Jura up the island as far as Tarbert (which I discover means a narrowing of the land, which is why there's lots of those in Scotland - this is the one where Jura is almost split in half and only a narrow bit of land joins the two parts).

We popped in to the Jura distillery shop, which gave Beth the chance to buy her second bottle of malt.

We also had a chat with some people who were camping in the only official camp site on Jura, which is essentially the garden on the Jura Hotel. They said it was a nice site but they had suffered badly with midges the previous night.

To finish the trip we drove back down to the ferry landing and then walked from there around the coast for a bit and then up onto the very start of the land which leads up to the Paps of Jura. We saw deer several times, both on the walk and earlier in the day on our drive.