One of our favorite stops was our day in the Shetland Islands. Our tour guide (one of our 4 Scottish guides or bus drivers named "Andrew" throughout the course of the trip) moved to the Shetlands with his wife when she got a job there. He had been there for 4 years and it was obvious that he loved his new home.
He gleefully informed us that we were experiencing a "warm, sunny Shetland summer day" - it was 50 degrees and drizzly. He explained that due to Shetland's combination of northerly latitude and being one of "last stops" on the Gulf Stream, that the islands don't really have extreme temperatures. He said that it doesn't ever get much warmer than 70, but also never really gets below about 23. (And, yeah, 23 is toward the colder end of things, but considering that I had do deal with a cold snap last winter where it got down to 10...)
Due to its location (approximately half-way between Norway and the Northern coast of Scotland), Shetland also was part of Norway/Denmark for many centuries. Along with the Orkney Islands, the Shetlands were given to Scotland as part of the dowry when a Norwegian princess married the king of Scotland in 1469. Even though it's been quite a while, the Shetlands consider themselves to be just as much Norwegian as Scottish; there is a dialect that is only spoken in the Shetlands that is a mix of Old Norse and Scotch Gaelic. Even our guide, when he referred to the mainland, made it sound like it was another country, saying that a lot of Shetlanders go to university "in Scotland" (even though Shetland is a part of Scotland and the UK).
Andrew was also telling us about the native plants and animals on the island - while heather and mosses are common, trees are rare. Birch trees only grow to be about 6 feet tall, and there are 100-year-old sycamores that are only 25 feet tall. I think I recall him saying that none of the trees that grow on the island are native. Also due to its being an island in the middle of nowhere, there are no deer, foxes, squirrels, or magpies. The largest carnivore is "a type of ferret called a polecat*." These were introduced to help control the rabbit population after they were introduced to the island by someone who didn't realize that there were no predators.
*Not a skunk, despite the fact that I always thought "polecat" was slang for "skunk."
