You Don't Live Like I Do

(this is a counterpart to cosmolinguist's entry here)

We left our intrepid trio unexpectedly still on the Scottish mainland after a last-hour ferry cancellation. The closest place I could find to stay was in Strathpeffer. It turns out that our hotel was a lovely Victorian pile. Our 3-person room was right up in the attic, presumably old staff / servant's quarters. It was called a "mountain view" room but our view of Ben Wyvis was rather obscured by chimneys.

We'd crashed out pretty early after arriving, which is just as well as we were awoken at 7am by a fire alarm. Fortunately this gave me a chance to catch up with correspondence about our ferry journey. Following the Wednesday evening cancellation, CalMac had rebooked our sailing for Saturday morning, cutting our time on the islands in half! But I managed to re-rebook for the Thursday evening, so we'd only be delayed by a day... if the ferry wasn't cancelled again!

The giant breakfast room contained the best breakfast haggis I've ever had. After we checked out we went for a nice stroll around the steep grounds, admiring the old lichen-covered trees and mossy lawns, before heading back inside for a restorative pot of tea, sitting on comfy old couches in a once-luxurious, empty lounge with huge portraits on the wall.

Strathpeffer itself is an old Victorian spa town and the Victorian-era terminus station is still standing, and now houses the Highland Museum of Childhood. This was a weird little museum - it has a collection of children's toys from the last 100 or so years, including some I remember from my own childhood, and the obligatory creepy dolls. There's also history of children's education in the highlands and islands over the last couple of centuries, including how the curriculum expanded from basic 3Rs to include cooking, handicrafts and farming as kids started to learn these less from their parents. There's a story about schools being so poorly funded that children were expected to bring a lump of coal or slab of peat into school with them, so between them the class could keep the fire burning for warmth all day. It was small but surprisingly dense and we spent a good time there.

Next door to the museum was a cafe where we had a nice lunch and fed a very good dog called Fudge who seems to live at the station. There was also a hippy shop where V and E bought a few knick-knacks. Finally we admired a carved wooden trunk with a potted history of Scotland, from Christian missionaries and Viking invasions through to space rockets and satellites! We then tried to visit the Pictish Eagle Stone but got the wrong directions and drove up a farm's drive. We saw the stone from the back and also some Valais Blacknose sheep, V's favourite breed.

We'd had a lovely time in Strathpeffer, but the prospect of a second ferry cancellation had been hanging over our heads, and it was time to get back on the road to Ullapool to discover our fate. This time things went pretty smoothly - we checked in at the ferry terminal, had a bit more of a potter around the town, including V and E checking out some local shops while I played Pokémon Go. I bought a present for sarahseamonster in the local bookshop. We loaded onto the ferry and stood on the deck to watch it pull away from the port. The journey was fairly uneventful - we gave E a tour of the ferry (which didn't take long), grabbed dinner from the onboard restaurant, and then napped in the front-facing lounge. It was dark by the time we pulled into Stornoway, but our AirBnB was only a few hundred yards from the ferry terminal so we arrived very quickly, unloaded our bags and once again collapsed into bed...

In an attempt to help cosmolinguist escape the cold and dark, and as a distraction from US politics, I followed my friend liw's advice and booked a long weekend holiday in the sun. I looked on Lastminute.com and there were a number of inexpensive package holidays in the Canary Islands in January. So many in fact that I had a bit of decision paralysis, but we decided we didn't want anything fancy or with lots of activities - the whole point would be to lounge around in warm weather and longer days. So I picked a three-star resort with relatively few amenities in Fuerteventura. We flew out on Friday and back on Tuesday. The weather was a little overcast the first couple of days, but at 15C still much warmer than the frosty UK, and rising to over 20C with bright sunshine on the Sunday and Monday. The days were appreciably longer too, being near the equator.

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On the whole I think it was a good trip. While it couldn't completely distract E from the shit-show that is the world and various other things, lying tipsily in the sun absorbing photons and doing very little was definitely a nice break for us. I came back feeling re-energised towards a few projects, and while life has had a fair go at grinding me down since I got back I can still remember the dry sunny air of Fuerteventura.