Opera in Poolewe

This afternoon we headed south to Gairloch, a pleasant drive that took us about and hour and a quarter. It was a fine, blustery day and we went for a bracing walk on Big Sand bay, from which we could see many mountains; on the mainland, on Skye and, barely visible in the distance, on Harris. We had a pub tea in the Millcroft Hotel which was nothing special but perfectly acceptable. The pub was very quiet, but we were lucky to find it because all the other restaurants in Gairloch are still closed for the winter. From there were travelled the short distance (about 10 minutes) to Poolewe Village Hall, where we had booked tickets to a Scottish Opera Highlights evening. The theme was love, and they had constructed a very loose plot about staff and guests at a wedding to give it a bit of structure. There were a couple of organisers taking the tickets, a piano player, and four excellent singers. They sang a variety of arias and duets and a few quartets, some of which were very familiar to us and some less so. It was a great evening. We set off back to Ullapool on the dark roads. There were a few other cars whose occupants had been at the concert, but by Aultbea the last of them had peeled off and we didn’t see any other cars at all, all the way to Ullapool. We did however see lots of deer at the roadside, so I had to drive very carefully so as not to hit any of them.