Travel tip #1: avoid us at all costs
Forget romance; travel is all delays, discomfort, and lukewarm tea.
Yesterday I shamelessly threw out a note on here begging for subscribers, I kid you not, begging. It was a punt and I didn’t think it would be seen let alone get traction. Well one train journey and flight later and I clocked up more than the two I was after to get me to the hallowed 200 and hit a mighty 214! That’s 16 new subscribers in just a few hours.
And so now it’s time to say thank you. Thank you to those who have recently joined me…welcome, I hope you enjoy it here and it doesn’t disappoint. And thank you, thank you to all of you who shared and commented on the note – I’m now wondering if I should put this into a quarterly growth plan? What do you think?
Whether you found me yesterday, last week or 6 months ago, you may have noticed that there’s a certain ramshackleness about me and my approach. Work is highly organised, but you’ll see life is a bit more hit and miss. I am not too neat and tidy, I’m not well turned out and am definitely not living any kind of Instagram life, or am I? Could I secretly be a lifestyle blogger? No, but after spending a weekend away visiting the family in the Netherlands, I do have a travel tip (singular) for you.
Top travel tip #1:
Don’t travel with us, near us, at the same time as us.
If you see us on any kind of manifesto, get wind of the fact we may be on your flight, change it. Immediately.
It’s not unusual for us to experience little hiccoughs along the way, like the fact we had to take our hire camper into the garage twice on a 16-day trip or we discovered the fuel flap on the car was broken and fixed shut so we couldn’t make it to the airport for a 6am flight. That kind of thing.
If you cast your mind back a few weeks you’ll remember we had a tricky journey to Heathrow from Aberdeen which resulted in a costly taxi cab ride to my home town:
Well, picture this…
After making the journey from Hoy to Inverness on Thursday ahead of our scheduled flight to Amsterdam the following morning, we decided not to tax ourselves too much and ate a mediocre dinner at the hotel. We’d had the foresight to buy ourselves a couple of beers from the shop and so after dinner we retired to our room to try and watch TV although the internet kept dropping out and so we spent the good part of an hour looking at a frozen Greg Davies sitting on his throne in Task Master.
We decided on an early night and were busy brushing our teeth at around 10pm when Erik got a ping on his phone. Something inside me just knew that it would be relating to our flight, a delay perhaps, but no, it was a full-blown cancellation. My heart sank then immediately perked up as I hoped it would mean we’d be cancelling our 4.30am alarm and would get an extra couple of hours sleep. Sadly not, we were booked onto a 7am flight to London Heathrow (LHR) and then from LHR to Amsterdam (AMS), yay 2 flights for the price of one. This would get us in at around 2pm, only 4.5 hrs later than planned.
The next day after everything seemed to be going smoothly, we boarded the plane at Inverness and got ourselves comfortable only to be hit with the news from the captain that we wouldn’t be able to take off for another 2 hours due to fog delaying arrivals at LHR and so we sat. Yes, we just sat on the plane waiting. We were at least allowed to get our complimentary drinks and snacks a bit early, a tepid cup of tea and a tiny oat bar.
As soon as we touched down, I checked departures as time was now pretty tight between our arrival and next departure. Not to worry, our onward flight was delayed by 50 minutes, we had plenty of time to go to the shop to get an Olbas inhaler for a cold that seemed to be getting progressively worse and spend a small fortune for the pleasure of sitting ‘inside’ Pret to drink yet another lukewarm cup of tea and munch on a sub-par sandwich.
We finally departed LHR at around 12pm, arriving in AMS at 2.30pm ish local time. The next bit was super simple, thank you Dutch railways. We headed to the trains which sit under the airport, hopped on the next one to Leeuwarden and a little over 2 hours later Mum & Dad were there at the station ready to collect us up, take us home and give us a much-deserved glass of wine.
Whoever says travelling is fun is lying; travelling is not fun. Being away can be fun, but hanging around in airports, lugging around a weekend’s worth of clothes and a surprisingly heavy laptop, sitting in uncomfortable seats and breathing in dry air when you already have a sore throat is not fun. If it was 10 years ago or a different kind of trip, we may well have just propped up the bar, but as I watched people at Inverness buying pints of lager and wine at 6.30am, I had to admit to myself that those days are over.
One thing I hadn’t given full consideration when we moved here is just how damn hard it is to get anywhere. While our little travel drama was ongoing, the girls started talking about setting a date for our next weekend away, something I’m reticent to get too excited by because in truth, leaving Orkney feels too much like hard work. However, I came to a decision that for a weekend with friends, I will no longer travel to anywhere that is not within one hour of an airport I can get a direct flight to, leaving us Sumburgh (Shetland), Inverness, Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Technically Belfast and London too, as we have same plane routes but they do involve 2 flights. And so, we have decided on somewhere near Edinburgh, which is wonderful, date tbc. My last trip with these girls was to North Yorkshire last June, I sadly had to forgo the trip to France earlier this year because of the number of extra days involved to get anywhere. This trip to NL should have been 3 days travel + 3 days in NL, but it turned more into 3.5 days travel + 2.5 days in NL.
Disappointing.
Well, the weekend wasn’t but the loss of the afternoon was.
We try to get the the Netherlands at least once a year (some years more) and apart from the covid years have always managed it, but this trip was extra special because we went to celebrate Erik’s parents 50th wedding anniversary, imagine that! The plan for Friday afternoon was to take a trip down memory lane and visit the place they’d got married, but it wasn’t meant to be. Instead we ate paella, drank wine, looked through photos and went through some of E’s old bits and pieces. Always a treasure trove of delights!
Their party on Saturday was a lovely low-key affair, in keeping with their style, an afternoon/early evening of cake, coffee, wine, Thai food and family. Plus, I got to spend most of the time talking to my 15-year-old niece whose English is brilliant. About a year ago her English teacher suggested she watched English speaking TV and films with English subtitles to improve her language skills and its phenomenal – Netflix is educational.
When we weren’t partying, we went on a couple of walks, one right on our doorstep and one a little further afield. You’ll often catch me saying I don’t miss trees but that’s not entirely true. Trees are marvellous and we do have them here in Orkney, we even have a few in our garden, but we don’t get swathes of woodland like you do down south. One of the things I love about living here is the space, looking out of my window and seeing uninterrupted views. I’m particularly in love with looking out from the west coast across the Atlantic to the edge of the earth. I like the vastness and openness, something trees and mountains obscure. But as we walked around a small woodland kicking though autumnal leaves and watching the sun creating beautiful patterns in the water, I realised that maybe in autumn I do in fact miss trees.
Now I’m in the car, travelling north along the NC500 to Gill’s Bay where we’ll take the Pentalina across the Pentland Firth to St Margaret’s Hope. We’re staying in a camping pod tonight on South Ronaldsay and then were off to pick up the pooch and with any luck, will be at home with a cup of tea by the time this lands in your inbox.
I bloody hope so!
Take care
Han 🧡
Firstly congratulations on achieving your next milestone, I had the same experience took forever to get to 200, then had an influx over a couple of days due to being recommend.
Travel is so painful at times, especially with the unreliability of flights, although the Dutch rail system is incredible! We lived in The Netherlands for five years and Europe just get public transportation so right.
Congratulations on crashing through the 200 subscriber barrier!