A Scottish Road Trip, let the adventure begin (part one)

So, this is it my first ever attempt at blogging! In my day we had scrap books and bought postcards and collected leaflets from the Tourist information to put them in. How things change? Here I am sitting on a tiny island (Sanday) in the middle of where the North Sea meets the Atlantic on a cold wet May evening using super fast broad band and hoping that this will work! In fact, between us, I’ve started this about three or four times over the past couple of days but have been failed by my ability to save a draft so who knows, you might actually be reading something now. In which case I hope that you are enjoying this and, maybe for the next update, I will have mastered this enough to even include some photographs. There should be time for that as this is a three and a half week trip and we aren’t home until three weeks tomorrow.

I say we so I’d better explain that this isn’t just about me. I am here with Emma the long suffering other half of my life. So how did we get to this point. We have both just had 30 years of working in the NHS and, when we were on holiday a couple of years ago in our campervan (also a part of this story and our adventure) decided, as we hadn’t had more than a couple of weeks of in all that time (apart from two periods of maternity leave – which apparently don’t count!) it was time to do something for ourselves. As they say life is just too short. Up to now, without any regret, all of our holidays have been family based – now the kids don’t need us, in fact we need them, at least one of them, to stay home and look after the house!! but look after might be the operative words so let’s just leave that there! Anyway back to it.. most of those family holidays as a four were up here in the islands and highlands so where better to recreate some old memories and create some new ones for ourselves. Time to reset, refresh and recharge.

So here’s a summary of the plan and what’s happened so far. Thankfully, for those of you that know the reputation of our holidays, we at least managed to set off and travel the first 500 miles without any mechanical failures. Just last year we had to get a new battery for the van the day we set off! Mechanical failures have never been limited to vehicles for us. We usually come with an assortment of bikes – usually managing to pick up obligatory punctures along with the odd snapped chain, broken derailleur and, the most extreme and potentially eye watering snapped seat pin leaving a very exposed and sharp seat post, for the second time in this blog, we’ll just leave that one there! Suffice it to say that the sound of the pin snapping was enough to make me stand up and get off my bike rather than sitting down…

Back to the summary and I’ll catch up with this with photographs if I ever get this thing to work. We left home, via Tebay Services for breakfast (another family tradition) and to buy a disproportionate amount of expensive cheese for some holiday indulgence. Can heartily recommend Tebay Services for those that haven’t been both for the breakfast and the cheese! They also do a very nice range in hot chocolate balls, at least so I am told. After over five decades I can honestly say that there are at lest two things I’ve never tried, one is a hot chocolate, I know, I’m told this is sacrilege and the other is that I’ve never had a kebab. I also know, that this is also sacrilege and I’ve lost count of the number of people that I’ve now promised to lose my kebab virginity too, after the obligatory eight pints of lager of course!!

I’ve digressed again, I’m afraid this will become a bit of a theme, welcome to my mind, it’s a wonderful place where nothing actually stays still for long but somehow it all make sense in the end.

Once the now long forgotten breakfast had been consumed we headed north and north and north a bit more, ending up in Dunbeath. I haven’t mentioned Emma much but she has a passion for and skill in using maps (they sound and look like a foreign language to me and I can’t really speak mappish!). Emma also has an ability to lose hours researching things on the internet including where to stay and has always come up trumps with ideal spots far from the maddening crowd. Dunbeath was no exception and we spent a pleasant evening sitting talking to a young Austrian couple who had a cunning plan of inviting us into their world on the pre-text of having won a bottle of Gin and needed something to mix it with. Anyway it was fun to wile away a couple of hours discussing all things European and really understanding how we are actually seen by our now ex European partners! I won’t go into any more details about my views on that one.. Needless to say, the joys of the modern information world, that we have also heard the good news that there will be a general election on the 4th July and we will be home in time for that!! Also for those of you who think that Edinburgh and Glasgow are well into Scotland, as beautiful as they are, according to the land mass that is beyond them they are barely on the border. Be brave fellow travellers there is a whole world of Scotland beyond what we know.

From Dunbeath it was a bit of a drive north again and a bit more north, in fact until it wasn’t possible to go any further without getting wet. And that’s wet by the sea and not the Scottish weather! The only thing that I would add at this point was a slight embarrasement at having to spend a bit of time on the North Coast 500 route. For those that don’t know about the NC500 it’s a 500 mile route round the coast of Scotland that is completed at all times of year by convoys of motorhomes and campervans and for the third time this blog I’m just going to say i’ll leave that one there!

The stretch of water (the Pentland Firth) between Gills Bay and St Margarets Hope is known affectionately as the bitches. We remember with fondness (well my fondness and Emma persistently reminds me that the word for her was frustration) at being on that boat with two quite poorly children, according to Google (which I am able to access on the afore mentioned super fast broadband the technical term is Kinetosis! For me the journey was easy, find a table, head down and sleep through it. For Emma, recounting the tale again the other day the story consisted of her relentlessly marching said children around the boat saying each time they passed my slumbering frame “yes daddy is still there” through what I now understand to be gritted teeth.

As I said re-creating old memories and creating new ones so I had the foresight not to suggest that I took a seat on this most recent crossing and took it like a man and stayed above deck the whole journey. Just for reference for anyone yet to embark on that crossing, those waters are never calm!

So we arrived in Orkney, where we were reliably informed never to refer to this archipelago (thats not a style of singing by the way it’s the collective term for any group of islands) as the Orkney’s, only as Orkney or the Orkney Islands or Isles so lesson quickly learned and we have never been to the Orkney’s. And I apologise profusely if I have misused the apostrophe, specifically and exclusively to one particular friend and you know exactly who you are.

After spending a few hours in Kirkwall, including a haircut for Emma and learning that there are expected to be 250 cruise ships hitting the town over the coming months we headed back to the ferry port to hit the small inter island boat to Sanday. Now talking of inter island experiences. A few years ago we took the worlds shortest scheduled flight from Westray to Papa Westray – a grand total of around 90 seconds. Obviously the pilot thought he had a monopoly on dad jokes as he turned from the open cockpit and said that the inflight movie was Gone With the Wind. I’m still not entirely sure whether this was a satirical reference to the length of the flight / movie or a reference to the weather, possibly both!! anyway this time we are flying from Kirkwall to North Ronaldsay with the heady flight time of 17 minutes, time for a double bill and a cocktail me thinks. Coming back it’s 34 minutes as we will also be landing back on Sanday and also on Stronsay, Good job I personally don’t suffer from kinetosis given all of that landing and taking off, like I didn’t say the pilot clearly didn’t have a monopoly on dad jokes and I’m sticking to that one!! when I read that to Emma It just got a disgruntled eye roll! Let’s also leave that there shall we!

Back to Sanday, we’ve had a great couple of days staying in an airstay site which also has a rather fabulous pizza cafe (called 59 degrees north) and, in case I didn’t mention, superfast broad band. The couple that run the place moved up from down south (that’s south England) not the Orkney mainland and have never looked back. We are now having dreams of setting up a bakery and cheese making business. It’s sad to see the local reliance on local produce dwindling, the days of self sufficiency have gone. Not everything progressive is good and you do sometimes end up wondering how much life these islands might have left in them. On a personal note as a great lover of fish and shell fish it amazes me that you just can’t get it here. When we first visited the Orkney islands (note that I didn’t refer to them as the Orkney’s) there was a crab processing plant on Westray, now that was a good place to visit as they sold direct from the door. I heard today that it closed down not long after the B word that I said I wasn’t going to talk any more about earlier on! Let’s just leave that there!

So for the past couple of days we’ve had summer and Autumn weather, it was beautiful on the first day and the second morning left us feeling brave enough for a paddle but not a full on swim..yet. The beaches are beautiful, full of white sand and turquoise sea. and how very dare that we’ve even had to share one beach with two other people and a dog. We’ve been to the heritage museum and a burial chamber. tomorrow (that’s Friday) is another day of touring and exploring. We usually park the van and then cycle when we are away, if nothing else it saves us from keeping packing the van up every time we want to go anywhere. Mind you we have had a conversation about tidiness today but for the sake of marital relations and the happiness of the next three weeks, least said soonest mended and all that..

I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and that you’ve actually been able to, If you haven’t I’ve just wasted even more of my life writing all this for no one to see. Like I say, fingers crossed that part two will include photographs and at least an update on the flights. I just realised, I haven’t told you about the rest of the trip.. So from Orkney we will travel back down through the central Highlands (avoiding as much as possible the NC500 and relying on Emma’s google like mind) to Ullapool and then out onto the outer Hebrides where we are hoping for adventures plenty. I have, however just realised how long this is so for now, I’ll say no more!! so until next time, super fast broad ban permitting slante!