This school holidays I’ve piggy backed on a friend’s holiday as she’s in Scotland visiting family. So we’re wandering around the West Coast for a week or so.
I’ve only seen a bit of Edinburgh before so any more is great, really! I decided to fly into Glasgow, as K was planning on meeting me in Stirling. I landed at almost midnight and stayed at the Ibis Styles in Glasgow central which was nice – small, but comfy bed and ensuite. The brekky was nice a mix of hot options plus cereals and fruit etc.
I had a couple of hours before picking up the hire car across the road so I took a wander around central Glasgow checking out the tardis-like police boxes and doing a bit of souvenir shopping. Found a good music/ bookshop and picked up a couple of interesting things for R, and some other souvenirs.
I’d booked a small car (a Mini) from the hire place, but they had nothing like that left, so they said I could have a ‘free upgrade’ to a ‘midsize’ SUV. I just wanted the car I’d booked, but it turned out they literally had 2 cars left: the behemoth SUV or a smaller manual car. Since I hadn’t driven a manual for a while, the SUV was really my only option. I headed down to the carport and found the mammoth car. It was so big it took me 20 mins to manoeuvre it up the spiral ramp of the carpark without scraping the sides. Then I managed to drop the parking ticket under the seat. This was the final straw- I burst into tears and had to leave the car in the exit lane of the carport and go back to the office to get a new ticket. What a comedy of errors! At least it was a hybrid and so was pretty fuel efficient.
After a few wrong turns and managing to negotiate my first single lane road and passing place, I made it to the next stop, a little farmstay outside Stirling where K had already stayed for one night. It was very quiet and the chalet had a spa and a great view. There were even sheep in the field next door to give us a bucolic soundtrack.
We tried to go to one of the local pubs for dinner, but none of the (3) pubs were cooking, so we headed to a supermarket 10 mins away and picked up some ready to eat food. I found coronation chicken in a tub – peak UK? Delicious on a gf pita bread anyway.
After a good sleep we were ready to hit the road for some sightseeing. Our first stop was the gardens at Drummond Castle. Gorgeous formal gardens laid out in a geometric design surrounding a centuries- old sundial and including a copper beech apparently planted by Queen Victoria in 1842.
We also experienced robo-mowers which were very creepy!
The espaliered apple grove was great, and it was amazing to see the greenhouses where plants we see all the time at home coddled to survive in the much colder climate. One wall of the greenhouse was taken up by a plumbago and another by a bougainvillea.
By this stage we were ready to head somewhere for lunch. The lady at the gift shop/ticket office recommended the visitor centre at a small town up the road, so we headed there for a traditional canteen experience of grabbing a tray and picking up the items we liked the look of. The place was also dog friendly, like a lot of places we’ve seen.
Then it was off to Oban, via Killin, a little village that had an independent pharmacist. I’d got a cut on my finger that was getting unhappy and needed some antibiotics. As a “holidaymaker”, I needed a chemist that was licensed to consult and dispense, as otherwise I’d have to find a gp, register as a temporary resident and then get a script and go to the chemist. This cut out the middleman, but finding the right kind of pharmacy before they all closed at 5.30pm while we were in the countryside was challenging! We did though – highly recommend the Davidson’s chemist at Killin!
Oban is a gorgeous waterside town, very clearly set up for tourists. We stayed in a small apartment overlooking the harbour and luckily found a parking spot close by – apparently parking is atrocious a lot of the time! We headed to the nearby Cuan Mor for dinner, which has amazing seafood and pub food. I had a gluten free battered haddock which was delish, very flaky with crispy batter.
On return to our apartment it seems that the management had given another group the wrong check in info and they were waiting outside our apartment trying to get in. Luckily it had my name on the door to show that we were supposed to be there! The management arrived and sorted it all out eventually.
We started early the next morning to drop into the large Tesco around the corner before hitting the ferry terminal to go to Mull. Driving onto the boat was a bit freaky, especially in my behemoth hire car – luckily they have people who help you park to make sure they can fit in the most amount of vehicles.
The ferry trip was uneventful apart from all the car alarms going off (including ours – I had no idea how to turn it off and just kept clicking the key fob to try to stop it whenever any of the alarms went off!) Driving off the boat was just as exciting as embarking, even more so as a local seagull, tried to dive-bomb us on the way out!
The drive to Fionnphort to catch the ferry over to Iona was not too bad. It was single lane with passing places all the way, but not as close as some of the roads on the mainland. Luckily at one point we were driving behind the express bus between Craignure and Fionnphort, so we could just tick along behind them without having to make the decision about who stops at the passing places and who barrels through.
The ferry to Iona was tiny, and because the island is car free apart from locals, we had to leave the behemoth at a car park with most of our luggage.
It was a beautiful day, so a popular one to visit the island. The ferry was full, with lots of groups of people heading up to see the Abbey and Nunnery. We were staying at the Columba Hotel, up from the village and close to the Abbey. Our rooms weren’t ready when we arrived, so we stopped for lunch (I had a yummy Cullen Skink!) and then had a wander.
The ruins of the nunnery were beautiful, with flowers and weeds growing through the stone. The Abbey was an order or two of magnitude bigger and more impressive (of course – the monks had a lot more money than the nuns!) The church there is still in operation and it was set out for a service later in the day.
We also explored some of the gift/craft shops – jewellery, handcrafts, wool, etc. I picked up a small skein of Iona wool as a souvenir, which will join the NZ yarn I brought back last time I was there, and maybe I’ll make something with them sometime…
We headed back to the hotel to check in properly and settle in before dinner. The restaurant at Columba is great – they have a lot of seafood as you’d expect, with local ingredients and lots of fresh greens and veg from their huge organic kitchen garden next door. They also make their own spirits, so we had to try out a pre-dinner cocktail.
K ended up with the fish’n’chips for dinner, whereas I tried the cured salmon with caviar and then mussels. Really tasty, especially the salmon, which was cured in the house gin.
We woke up to a very different sort of day – instead of the bright sunshine of the day before, we were confronted with lots of rain. We packed up and headed to the wharf to hop on our tour to Staffa. There weren’t many others there to join in, and even fewer when Skipper Grahame explained that it would be a rough crossing over to Staffa and the possibility that all the wildlife would be taking shelter from the weather. We decided to stick to the plan, as Fingal’s Cave was our first priority, and the puffins would be a bonus if we saw any.
The trip out was about 50 mins and was rough, especially as we got close to the island, as we were out in open sea. I wasn’t the only one feeling a bit delicate in the stomach but only one person lost their breakfast! The island is amazing – the hexagonal basalt pillars are a sight to behold, and picking our way over the tops of them around to Fingal’s Cave was hair-raising! Very alien landscape. The cave itself was very cool.
We then climbed the stairs up the cliff to wander over the island to the puffin colony. We had spent too much time at the cave to have enough time to get there and back, so we just enjoyed the cliiffs and rugged landscape until it was time to return to our boat.
Armed with seasickness tablets, we battened down the hatches in our yellow slickers for the trip back to Fionnphort. And it was ROUGH. The boat was rolling over the Atlantic swell, and sitting at the back was like having buckets of seawater thrown over us every minute or two as we crashed into more waves. It was supposed to calm down as we entered the water “shielded” by Iona, but that didn’t really happen. It was certainly an adventure to experience! As we left, our skipper told us that they would be cancelling the trips for the next day at least, so we knew we’d done the right thing by persevering, or we wouldn’t have had the chance to see it.
We sloshed our way back to the car and threw our sopping wet outer layers in the back. Thank goodness for the heater!
The drive up to Tobermory was uneventful. I was amazed that even the road to the biggest town on the island is still mostly single lane with passing places. I’m getting much better at negotiating them, even without a bus to follow.
Our accommodation in Tobermory was a little upstairs flat in a local lady’s house, with multiple heaters and a very comfortable couch. This was good because it rained nonstop our whole time in Tobermory so we didn’t get out too much. It meant K could catch up with Wimbledon and I could read.
We popped down to the harbourside to see the coloured buildings and check out some of the shops, and picked up some food supplies from the Co-op.
Another rainy day activity was heading to The Glass Barn, a cafe and farm shop up the road. They had cheese, venison, gin, liqueurs, chutneys and all things yummy, so we picked up a few items to have for dinner. This went very well with the smoked salmon and smoked mussels I bought at the Smokehouse.
We also tried to find a couple of the standing stones sites around town, but both were pretty much mud pools, so we weren’t able to get close. It did mean we went past Glengorm Castle to have a peek though.
Two Weeks Away 