Scotland Day 1

Wednesday, 10 July 2024

Today’s first challenge was to make it out to Stansted airport in time to catch our Ryan Air flight which departed at 8am – this meant being ready to walk out the door of our hotel at 5am. I’m not sorry to be leaving it – despite its great location the room was cramped to say the least,  unbelievably expensive (just under 500 per night),  had very hard mattresses and tiny beds, the ensuite was less than a metre wide, and it was easy to spot which hotel was ours in the street of similar hotels because ours was the only one which had piles of rubbish in pink garbage bags outside of it. Oh and the hotel sign was simply an a4 piece of paper sticky taped to a pole. Fancy.

We made it all the way to Edinburgh with no major hassles until we got to the hertz car rental desk – well, we got to the hertz car rental desk QUEUE , which was long and very very slow - it took us over an our to make it to the front of the queue and we joined with only 9 other people in front of us – we considered ourselves lucky though as people arriving later had to join the queue with almost 30 irritated customers ahead of them.   We finally got our instructions for the car and went outside to get it, only to find it wasn’t there, in fact it had been lent out an hour earlier.  Back inside the staff apologised and said they would upgrade us to an automatic car for our troubles.  I was happy with this until we went back outside to discover the ‘upgraded’ car was actually a Toyota Yaris which was a difficult fit for all of us and our bags (or original car was bigger). With nothing to be done but pay 50 pounds a day to upsize, we stuffed ourselves in and finally headed into the highlands of Scotland, stopping first at the supermarket to fill any tiny space left in the car.

The drive over to the coast via Glencoe was really spectacular and we stopped lots of times to take in  the amazing views, as well as another longer stop to wait for a train to go over a via duct where Harry Potter was filmed. 

We are now staying in a bunk house in a tiny town by the sea and we’ll be up early again to get the ferry across to the Isle of Skye.