Monday 30 April 2012

Holiday to Orkney: Part One!

The week-before-last Adrian and I travelled up to Orkney to visit Beverly.  It was a journey of epic proportions, my loves!  We started on the Thursday evening by catching a local train into London King's Cross.  Then it was a short walk along the Euston Road to Euston Station to catch the sleeper to Inverness.  We had the day and night in Inverness and then caught the early train on Saturday morning for the 3 3/4 hour journey to Thurso.  We then had a short taxi ride to the ferry terminal at Scrabster for the 1 1/2 hour ferry crossing over to Stromness ~ finally we were in Orkney!  It was then just a 30 minutes bus ride to Kirkwall, where our holiday cottage was located!  Then we did it all in reverse a week later LOL

I must admit that I was very stressed-out about the journey; as I mentioned here, my back was playing up again before we left home, and was very painful and stiff.  I was so worried that the journey would make things worse.  As it turned out, though, it was nowhere near as bad as I had feared, although it was very tiring.


Adrian and I had inter-connecting compartments on The Caledonian Sleeper ~ which were very "cosy", as you can see!  I hadn't been quite so concerned about this part of the journey actually, since I knew that I would be able to lay down in the bed. 


More views ~ photos above and below ~ of the sleeper compartment.



This is the engine which took us to Inverness ~ although I don't think it was the one we started out with at Euston as the train splits into different sections at various points on the journey.


I couldn't get far enough back on Inverness station to get the whole of the engine in one photo!




This is the holiday cottage we stayed in, in Kirkwall.  There was a little group of cottages, which looked as if they had been built in recent years.  It was lovely and spacious inside, very clean and with a well-kitted out kitchen.  We are planning to go back again next year and are hoping we will be able to book one of these cottages again :-)

As the cottage had two bedrooms Beverly was able to stay with us all week.  Here she is with the little cutie~pie that she looks after.  Niamh's Mum, Cate, dropped her off each morning on her way to work and then picked her up again on her way home :-)


Niamh will be three in June and she is such a bright little girl.  Her language skills are incredible and sometimes you forget that she is still only a little tot.  Considering the to-ing and fro-ing she did during the week we were there, she was pretty well behaved on the whole. 


Niamh didn't want to sit next to Uncle Adriancot (this is what she has always called him!) to have her photo taken but she was happy to sit on my lap.  She "shared" a piece of her cookie with me ~ oh, the joys of soggy biscuits LOL


Niamh likes to pose for photos and is very good at saying "cheese" :-D 

Whilst I didn't take a humungous amount of photos, I guess there are quite a few so I will finish this post here and upload the others tomorrow!

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