Saturday 11 September 2010

UK Day 11 - Durness to John O'Groats

We made great headway today. I’d hoped but not counted on getting as far as John O’Groats, and getting the ferry/tour to Orkney Islands tomorrow. And it all went according to plan. The rain from yesterday was still seen around sometimes, but it didn’t actually rain for me at all. My good weather has caught back up to me after I’d confused it by doubling back, obviously ;-)
We left Joyce and Johnny’s at about 9.30am and heading back into town, past the Smoo Cave and then the beautiful Sango Sands Beach (with a big sign saying “Award Winning Beach” but no sign nearby saying what it’s called!):
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Then it was off towards Tongue:
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Then onwards from Tongue:
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Around Skerray, with even scarier roads, and some sweet grandma’s house is falling down. She waved to us though. Her house looked really sweet from past the trees, where you couldn’t see the falling down bits…:
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Around Bettyhill, where we stopped for coffee, since we’d had no decent coffee all day (unfortunately, that didn’t change). We did meet a lady who lives in Salzburg, but was visiting her aunts is Scotland (where she was born too). She explained to us that her aunts were 93 and 86. When one of her aunts drove off in her little Ka car, I’d assumed it was the 86 year old, but no, it was the older one! She blamed it on the fresh air up here. There’s plenty of that, that’s for sure!:
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We drove up to Strathy Head to see the lighthouse but the walk to that was further than we wanted to go in that wind, so we skipped it, and headed onwards. We stopped again to see St Mary’s Chapel, which was marked on the map and looked important. It didn’t look that way when we finally arrived there after traipsing across various meadows and rivers. The beach nearby with the black slate was interesting though, so it wasn’t a total loss:
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Next stop was Thurso. It was the first city we’ve seen since leaving Glasgow. Everything else was too small to be considered a city. This one was small too, but it had probably 8 churches and half a dozen hotels and quite a few streets. We checked out prices at hotels and then I rang up to book the tours at 5.30pm. I asked them if they knew of any B&B’s or hotel in the area and they put me on to Windy Ha B&B. It’s a double (they don’t have twins) but it’s really beautiful. Dinner was at the pub just up the road, so we could’ve walked if it wasn’t so cold and windy.