There was plenty of driving on today’s route.
We were down at breakfast when it opened at 08:00 to ensure a timely departure for our long drive north over the highlands.
It took just over three hours to reach Scrabster on the northern coast, a place that masquerades as a town, but consists of little more than the ferry port and some oil storage tanks. Scrabster is just a couple of kilometres west of Thurso, which we unfortunately didn’t have time to see.
Most of today’s drive on the mainland was along single track roads through some of Scotland’s remotest terrain. No hotels, motels or tea rooms line the roads here. There aren’t even houses, never mind commercial ventures. In fact, there are barely any cars going in the opposite direction. You really don’t want to break down out here.
En route to Scrabster, the centre console got doused with water when I had to brake suddenly, causing a badly placed mug on the armrest to shoot forward and spill. There wasn’t a lot of liquid in the mug, but it was enough to make the MMI (which is Audi’s name for the car’s software interface) go haywire, which left us without sat-nav, CD, radio, etc.
Luckily for us, it started to work again a few hours later and seems to be OK now. That was a close call and a huge relief.
The ferry crossing to Orkney was nice, with a nice play area for children and an information area stocked with brochures and free papers about the islands. It wasn’t as busy as the crossings we’ve done in the west, so the lunch queue was short and there was plenty of seating all around the boat. This made for a nice, relaxed atmosphere.
The weather had also cooperated, so we got a good view of the islands as we came in, including a crystal-clear gander at the Old Man of Hoy.
We docked in Stromness on an island confusingly named Mainland. We had seen our hotel from the boat as it docked, so we knew that it was just around the corner from the quay. I checked us in, but didn’t bother to haul our suitcases inside, as that would take too much time and it was already nearly 15:00.
Instead, we drove out to Stenness to look at a couple of sites with standing stones. Afterwards, we came back to Stromness for a mosey around town. It’s an quaint little oddity of a place, paved with flagstones and flanked by a mixture of flowering gardens and drab stone houses. Its backdrop of water and the island of Hoy is indisputably appealing.
There appear to be fewer foreign vehicles here, but perhaps they’re all in Kirkwall. We’re certainly not the only foreign visitors, though, as they were swarming over the couple of sights we visited.