Departing the Orkneys: Day 1

Leaving the Orkney’s cast a sad note on our travels. We departed on an early boat to mainland Scotland in order to make our way to Edinburgh – our last stop. Our island journey’s had been unimaginable, so it was hard to move on to the last leg of our Scotland trip.

There was no gambling on this ride. My mother and father read their respective books (my father was well engrossed in Royal Assassin by Robin Hobbs, the second book in a trilogy my mother and I had conspired to make him read). I was writing in my journal while my brother played solitaire for lack of any other activity.

My mother and I went briefly to the open deck for parting views with those magical cliffs. There was some real crappy espresso involved from the ship’s eatery (there’s no good coffee in the UK. I think it’s payback for our rowdy tea party back in Boston). But aside from that, it was a fairly uneventful ferry ride.

The day, too, was one of fairly uneventful travel. The mainland was pretty, but like a pond of beauty after staring so long into an ocean, it was much less impressive. We stopped at a tea room that was on the coast, and had a quite marvelous view, the ruins of a small castle were clearly visible on a tiny nearby island that was likely not an island when it had been built. The terrain there was hilly and uneven. To give an idea of just how uneven it was, one could have stepped from the parking lot onto the roof of the neighboring house, so steep a drop was it from the parking lot to the surrounding land.

The tearoom itself wasn’t much, but it had a yard sale – style collection of junk in the back, from which I purchased a pretty basic, usable working man’s flask.

Later in the drive (which turned out to be mostly highway driving for once in our trip) we stopped at a splendid castle. I do not recall the name, but they charged 8 pounds (roughly $16) per person for admission, thus we settled on viewing it from the outside only.

We did, however, end up stopping for a tour of the Glen Morangie scotch whiskey distillery. It had a riotously funny film introduction that featured couples in all sorts of romantic environments and a constantly melodramatic voice that seemed to sincerely believe that whiskey and romance were one and the same. The tour itself was pretty informative, and ended with a glass of whiskey for everyone that was probably worth the price of admission.