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Day 11: Portree, Oban (Connel)
Was a busy day of stops and travelling, so I set my alarm for just after 7am, and of course was awake at 6am. Google told me that Cafe Arriba, place of yesterday’s full breakfast, would open at 8am, so figured that I’d be right to grab breakfast there once I packed and sorted everything. I don’t know if today was some sort of special Tuesday, but breakfast was not to be: nowhere serving hot food appeared to be open at 8am in Portree today. Not even at 8.10am, when I grabbed a bread roll and some cheese slices from the Co-op supermarket. While Skye is indeed beautiful, I’m leaning…
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Day 10: Portree
The morning kicked off with my first full Scottish breakfast of the trip, basically all the good stuff: black pudding, bacon, potato bread, flat sausage, beans, egg, mushrooms, half a tomato, and toast. Happily, no white pudding to be seen, it’s been a while since I last tried this, but having had it several times, the best I could describe it is “meh”. P has been poking me to have some, so I’ve said I will if he does (he’s a vegetarian). Anyway, the breakfast was good, even if the cafe had a weird Spanish name and hints of Spanish food on the menu (we’re quite a way away from…
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Day 9: Inverness, Portree
A bit of a long day, with a bunch of driving, walking, and dealing with painful customer service. I’ve been getting around with Optus international roaming, at $5/day it’s a bit expensive but has convenience. They also recently changed it from the kind of clunky charging by the week or day, to now charging by the day with auto activation. So every day I’ve been getting a text message to tell me my roaming has been activated for another day. Except today, the messages all said they couldn’t process payment. I’m not full of cash, but know that my accounts can handle $5. Tried another account, no luck. A third,…
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Day 8: Inverness, Loch Ness
Our last full day in Inverness and, once I finish this entry, I’ll have caught up on the backlog of days. G wanted to have a quiet day pottering around the B&B and town, possibly a little burnt out from our “short trip to Dufftown” yesterday where he was the driver. M&P wanted to do some wandering around Loch Ness, so I happily joined them. We headed south, and were soon alongside the loch, traversing the Great Glen that basically splits the Scottish mainland into two bits. It’s certainly a very beautiful split, driving along Loch Ness if one stunning view after another, once the trees part. Our first stop…
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Day 7: Inverness, Culloden, Dufftown, Speyside
“A short trip to Dufftown”, words that will live in infamy almost as long as the Duke of Cumberland’s orders of “No quarter” at Culloden. Travelling with a member of Clan Donald, a visit to the battlefield of Culloden was on the itinerary. You won’t get a history lesson here, as a chunk of what I know is derived from reading the Dr Who novelisation of The Highlanders as a pre-teen. The visitor centre was a decent experience, more balanced than I expected, but I guess we’ve got to a point in time where we can interpret events like this with a more nuanced view, looking at world context, the…
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Day 6: Glasgow – Inverness
Writing this two days behind, while G, who has been part of the team keeping me up drinking some quality drams, complains that I’m not up to date. Last morning in Glasgow was uneventful, I did the usual wake up too early so was left with a bit of time to wait before I could check out of my room (they only had part-time reception and wanted to make sure I checked out properly). Turns out no one turned up at 9am so ended up lugging my bag in one hand up Bath St and calling them to let them know I was checking out. Met the gang at the…
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Day 5: Glasgow
Now where were we? Then it was walk, kebab, sleep, hangover. Welcome to Glasgow. Ah, I remember now. It was a rather slow morning, doing as little as possible while my liver and kidneys did what I brought them along to do, and the paracetamol kicked in to help some. I was upright and mostly human by around 11.30am, just a little too late to get the breakfast menu at the nearby Smile Cafe, but in time for the lunch menu including some amazing pizza by the slice. And when I say slice, they say 1/4 of a whole pizza. With this amount of salami and zucchini pizza, plus a…
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Days 4: Frankfurt-London-Glasgow
Early start in Frankfurt, as my flight to London was a 7am departure. I figured if I got to Frankfurt Hbf a little after 5am I’d be fine. It took me a little while longer than expected to get everything together, not helped by a crap night attempting to sleep while my brain kept poking me to make sure I didn’t oversleep and miss the flight, so I got the the station around 5.15am, still a comfortable amount of time in theory. I hadn’t accounted for the happens-more-often-than-expected thing that German trains sometimes do run late. Germans will joke about this, crazy as the concept seems. So I board the…
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Day 3: Frankfurt
The final actual day in Frankfurt, and I’ve done a lot of walking the last couple of days, so I took things a bit slower. I had planned to take in a couple of museums, the Senckenberg Natural History Museum and the Stadt Museum, but I stuffed up on the research as the Stadt is closed on Mondays. Fortunately the Senckenberg wasn’t, so I went and checked out the dinosaurs and other wonderful attractions. I had one of those moments, coming out of the U-bahn station, where I wasn’t sure if I’d emerged in the right place or was heading in the right direction. Fortunately, after 20 or so metres…
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Day 2: Frankfurt
Welcome to the next installment of possibly the world’s least read and least informed travel blog. Today was the day that some may have been waiting for: the day when the 4 year old yells at me in German. Today I was able to spend a few hours with L’s cousin S, and S’s 4 year old Tochter A. Last time we were here, we met one of L’s other cousins, K, who was 3 and had a huge personality, an didn’t understand why I didn’t speak much German. So she spoke at me slower, and louder, and when that didn’t work, most of the time just yelled “Nein! Nein!”…
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Day 1: Transit – Singapore – Frankfurt
There’s a line by Mick Thomas in a Weddings Parties Anything song that goes, “There’s no point writing postcards on your bad days” and I quote it a bit. I’m gonna tweak it a little today, and turn it into: there’s no point writing long postcards on you long days; and with today being a long long long day, I’ll try to keep it short. Wasn’t the bet flight into Singapore, there were several small people around where I was sitting, and they haven’t yet got to the point of enjoying flying. One poor cherub must have screamed for 90 minutes straight, I didn’t ee what their parent’s were doing…
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Day 0: Hello transit my old friend…
So it begins, another trip, another opportunity to see the wonders of the world. This one may well end with a blown out liver or blown out ears, we shall see. Welcome again to the world’s least read travel blog, the random ramblings of a semi-entitled white guy who should know better than try to make sense of anything, let alone anything different or cultural. But that’s where we’re at. It’s looking to be a very “white” trip this time, taking in a little of Germany, a chunk of Scotland, and a swerve through the Netherlands. First world problems all the way. Expected highlights of this trip are expected to…
