When ‘Getting There’ takes 12 hours, a ferry, two flights and an unexpected taxi

Orkney to Kent & back ⛴️ 🛫 🛬 🚖

On Thursday last week Erik and I trotted off down south to my home town of Tunbridge Wells (TW) in Kent to see my brothers and celebrate my eldest Brother’s 50th birthday.

Journeys are rarely simple and there’s usually some kind of drama. Interestingly it happens more often on our journeys out of Orkney which makes me think the islands don’t want us to leave.

Here’s a run down of how things went last week ~ spoiler ~ not to plan!

6.30am

The alarm goes off at around the same as usual because although I’ve taken the whole day off work, I can’t help myself but check in plus I haven’t quite packed yet. Oh, and I need to wash my hair.

9.15am

After refusing to go on a walk with E, I relent and take Kiki dog for a stroll down the lane and back. There’s a lot happening for her little anxious brain today and so she doesn’t need the full works, even when we do try to exhaust her before a trip in the car it never works. So far, the only thing that’s worked is copious amounts of drugs and last time we tried it seemed to have a negative effect, so unfortunately she has to ride it out. Refusing to walk with E is a newer problem, she can make it to the end of the garden and then she refuses to walk, trying to drag him back. It is a little bit tedious.

10.30am

The clothes have been tried on to assess exactly how hideous and flabby I look in them. I’ve decided on the items that are passable and am aiming to have that ‘I don’t give a shit’ attitude and exude the sort of confidence that mean people don’t notice the extra stone and a half you’re carrying about these days. Either that or they don’t actually care, don’t judge and just want to be with you for being you and are totally unworried by the fact you looked better 3 years ago when you regularly went to that running fit club.

11.30am

E: “Are you ready?”

Me: “yeah, pretty much, just getting the last bits together. How long have we got?”

E: “Half an hour, 35 minutes”

Me: “Great loads of time”

11.55am

Me: “Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuucccccccccccck”

This is where I am running around muttering to myself and E is saying “what, what was that?’

Me: “I DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR THIS, just sort the dog bed and pack the car”

Harmonious.

12.03pm

We’re off, drama over, I even have a cup of tea and we make it to the ferry terminal a whole 23 minutes early…

The ferry terminal is across the bay from our house, so we see it coming and going. I’m the person that leaves the house when I see the ferry coming in, E is the person who likes to be there at least, the very least, 18 minutes before departure. Although I am brilliant at getting there ahead of time on the way home, going out is a much more casual affair.

12.35pm

We’re on the boat and Kiki and I have decided to head out of the car and take in the cool breeze of the deck, although I am ruining all her fun by keeping her away from the very cute and well-behaved collie that she is desperate to inanely bark at. Instead, she had to entertain herself with putting her little snoz through the bars and experience sea spray! It’s all very cute.

1.15pm

Co-op, Stromness:

1.    Banana’s (Kiki)

2.    Meal deal (us)

Yes, we stopped at Stromness just for food. Onwards

2.00pm

Marwick. This place is HEAVENLY. Seriously mate. Like Rackwick on Hoy, Marwick looks out onto the vastness that is the Atlantic. You can feel it in the air and see and hear it in the way the waves crash. It’s like Cornwall in so many ways but not. It’s comforting. As kids we spent many happy and wild holidays at Constantine Bay near Padstow, there is nothing quite like the Atlantic battering the west coast of the UK. If there was anywhere else I would want to live in Orkney, it would be along this patch of coast.

Couldn’t decide between a photo of the sea or this one of Kiki dog hoping she was going to snag a bit of bacon or a crisp. Kiki won.

3.00pm

Time to drop Kiki off at the kennels, marred only slightly by the fact that someone else also planned to drop their dog off early so we had to hang around outside biding our time with an increasingly wound-up pooch who wanted it all to be over and an increasingly wound up human (me) who was clock watching because we have to be at the airport in one hour.

There had been a lingering smell, in the car so I took this momentary break to give Kiki’s bedding a right good sniff. I decided to switch out her blanket for the spare in the car even though it hadn’t been that long since we last washed it but still, nothing worse than sending the dog to kennels with manky bedding, right?

We left her looking all forlorn, staring out of her kennel as we drove off. Honestly the guilt!

4.03pm

Kirkwall airport – huzzah!

As we grabbed our things out of the car, I still couldn’t get over the funky smell. Turns out I had a full poo bag in my jacket pocket, no doubt from this mornings walk – it wasn’t the bedding after all. Still, it makes me happy that we won’t be getting into a totally toxic car on Monday when we return.

We’re only a small family of three and until late 2020 there were just the two of us, so a Ford Fiesta is a pretty perfect fit. We got the car back in 2013 and it serves us well, I can’t see us changing it until we need to. BUT we treat it with very little respect. We never clean it, inside or out, it transfers human, dog and all the general rubbish. One of the back widows drops a weeny bit and the seal round the windscreen is pretty rubbish so during winter it’s permanently damp. Let’s just say, when we got in it earlier in the day and it smelt a lot funky, we just put it down to ‘car’ and so I’m relieved it was a bag of dog poo and not a permanent pong.

4.27pm

We’re flying Logan Air from Kirkwall to Aberdeen (ABZ) then onwards to Heathrow (LHR) with British Airways (BA). They have that ‘sister’ relationship going on so we booked the flight through BA and what’s supposed to happen is we drop our bags at Kirkwall and they do all the work leaving us to pick them up in LHR. Unfortunately, the woman at the desk couldn’t check us on for our ABZ-LHR flight which was a bit off but she said BA systems had been playing up. This would leave things very tight for us with only 1h15 minutes to collect our bag, check in, go through security and get our flight IF the flight arrives on time, a rarity.

4.40pm

E felt a little discombobulated so decided to check on the status of the BA flight and, you guessed it, cancelled. Then just before we boarded, as I was trying to find a bloody contact number - customer service is all FAQs and chatbots these days - I got a text to say we’d been booked on the 8.25pm leaving us enough time to get all the trains back Tunbridge Wells. OK, back on track.

6.00pm

Arrive at ABZ huzzah

See a departures board and see that our new flight is due to depart at 11.15pm

Swoah. How are we going to get to TW?

Pick up bags

Check in. We’re told that we should be departing at around 9.30pm, but to keep an eye on the board. There’s all sorts of weather down South which is playing havoc with the flights. Delayed and cancelled flights is par for the course up here, so it doesn’t incite any rage, just a big sigh and I’d far rather be on a later flight or no flight at all as opposed to be in a metal can hurtling through the sky in the middle of a lightning storm. We head through to departures.

6.35pm

The upside of being on a later flight is that we have enough time to eat and get a pint, well two pints. The pub is wildly overpriced of course, it costs almost as much for a pint of IPA as it does a mediocre burger, but that is what we are left with.

6.45pm

Receive a flurry of texts from BA.

Text 1:

“We’re sorry your flight BA1317 to London Heathrow is running late. Your estimated departure time is 21:33 local time”

I’m pretty sure I already knew that.

Text 2:

“We’re sorry your flight BA1317 to London Heathrow is running late. Your estimated departure time is 20:51 local time”

Ok getting better.

Text 3:

“We’re really sorry that your flight has been cancelled due to adverse weather conditions in London. To help get your travel plans on track, we’ll be rebooking you onto the next available flight which you can view in [link]. Please look out for an email with information.”

What the…

Next thing 3 other people have jumped up to get a better view of the departure board, one who had been sitting next to us, so to save my weary self, I just waited till he came back to ask. We think it’s a glitch or catch-up in the system as all looks good on the board.

8.43pm

We’re sitting down on the flight and things are looking up. By 9.37pm I have a cup of tea and tin of red wine, things are looking even more up.

Finally on the plane and never happier than with tea and wine!

11.28pm

After a 30-minute wait for our bag, we are finally breathing in the ‘fresh’ Heathrow air and following a crowd towards the buses and taxis.

At this point we know we can’t get back to Tunbridge Wells by train. We had considered heading into town and staying somewhere near London Bridge or Farringdon, but costing it all up, we estimated that as about £200 plus the inconvenience of arsing about trying to find somewhere to stay and then getting up at the crack of dawn to head South, so we set ourselves a limit of £250 for a taxi and aimed to hunt one down. The queue was massive, so massive in fact that E didn’t believe it was the taxi queue so we walked alongside it until we came to the taxi sign and he accepted, this was it.

As it turns out, the only taxis allowed here are the Hackney Carriages (black cabs) I guess because they are the official London Taxi firm, but there are a load of taxi’s upstairs. A very nice man asked if we were looking for a cab and where we wanted to go to…”Tunbridge Wells, bloody hell, I don’t know how much that would be off the top of my head.” He then told me to look at the price list on his phone, we were on the list at £225. So, we followed him!

11.50pm

Once we got out of Heathrow and the giddiness of maybe getting back to TW sometime in the near future and knowing I’d be able to have breakfast with my brother and his kids who I wouldn’t see again that weekend (co-parenting, not his weekend) I suddenly thought…who the hell is this bloke?

Better late than never I decided to ask him who he was and who he worked for – he’s an Uber driver of course and was able to show us his ID and driving licence. I apologised as usually I would do that before we set off rather than part way through a journey at a 4-lane roundabout, but I was tired. So very tired.

1.16am

Bed.

We made it back to the hotel, after a very chatty journey. Oh my god could that man chat. He said before we got in the cab, “ah this is great I can talk to you the whole time down” – I put E in the front!! The driver did most of the chatting but he did say several times to E, she’s right you know and never was a truer word said. I am right. Always. All ways.

Alarm set for 6.30am so we can start the weekend with a bang – breakfast with a 7, 9 and 11 year old!

I started writing this post at ABZ when while I was finishing pint 2 and waiting for our plane to arrive. I finished it on my journey back on Monday which was smooth. I mean super smooth.

Up and out of the hotel by 5.20am, then on the train to LHR (2 changes) arriving there at just before 8am. Check in was super quick as was security, leaving ample time to fill the water bottle, have a pee, grab hot drinks and a croissant before we went to the gate. We arrived in and left Dundee on time and were driving out of Kirkwall Airport by 1pm. We had time to go to the library, top up the shopping at Tesco, take a side driving side tour of Broch of Gurness, Evie and Brough of Birsay, pick up the dog and get the last ferry home.

This all delightfully saved us needing to get the 7:10 ferry out of Hoy on Tuesday to do the Library/Tesco/dog chores which was good because it seems I have been hit by my niece’s stomach bug. Which is also why this is now a Wednesday afternoon post, not a Monday/Tuesday post.

Take care

Han 🌱

PS. I am trying to get into the habit of creating an audio version of each post. This was a long one and a bit of a stretch for me!