Exit Strategy

In the end, I got barely thirty days in the wilderness, and virtually none of it as alone as I imagined. I suffered through some of my goals, saw more than I ever though possible, and in good American tradition, left a brilliant foundation for a sequel. By the time I post this, some of you will know that I have returned to America early to resume caring for my farm. Eric, already struggling to fill in for me, has accepted a full time position with Fiskers, the electric car company that took over the old GM plant. Despite the fact there will be no product until 2013, he started training immediately.
I've spent the last ten days exploring the west coast of Scotland, Isle of Skye , and the Outer Hebrides isle of Lewis & Harris with my friend David. Initially, he had planned to come up for a long weekend, but the vast remoteness of the country there, and the inaccessibility of attractions made a short trip pointless. The most fascinating sites are often separated by twenty or thirty miles, with few buses and no services or even places to refill a canteen with water. He rented a car after we missed the only bus of the day from an extremely remote destination. (We didn't actually miss it, the bus driver just rolled right by four of us, looking straight ahead, speeding away...) The car was enormously helpful, we put over 600 miles on it in less than a week.
So how do you condense a wonderful week and a half of exploration into a paragraph or three that won't make people grind their molars off as they read it? Part of the magic was the people we met; Sven, a humorous German fellow who rode with us for a few days.. Jarrod, a teen and avid fisherman in our hostel who turned 19 Friday night and who cooked two of the best trout I've ever eaten yesterday....a local woman at a craft festival who bought not, one but two heather plants....(for surely I've already mentioned the heather infested moors in a previous post?) and then waved them in my face, while I tried not to laugh, as she regaled us with stories about her trip to America...
The places? The standing stones (sort of like Stonehenge), the old churches or ruins? The rugged coastlines or endless trails to walk? Finding the first legal scotch distillery on the island in 200 years- but apparently it's not allowed to advertise? The guide books and tourist information for the area weren't comprehensive, so a lot of it was just piecing things together and stumbling onto other things.