Our 2015 tours are finished. I’m glowing from the sheer fabulousness of spending all this time taking wonderful people to amazing places. I’m going to be missing my travel friends for quite some time, but I’m also looking forward to spending a couple of days with my sweetie as we meander our way home. After…
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Back on the mainland, we made a pilgrimage of a different sort. Our friend and travel companion is a golfer, so today we journeyed to his holy grail, the Old Course at St. Andrews. Even I felt a bit choked up when they let us walk out across the green to visit the wee Swilken…
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We arrived on the Holy Isle of Iona yesterday afternoon, and after a leisurely visit to the sacred sites, we headed to the beach for an evening of sea life and shell collecting. And on the way home we pitched in for a bit of neighbourly support:
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Today was about travel as we made our way down Loch Ness on the mainland then out to the island of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. It is a slightly complicated journey at the best of times, but that complication was compounded by a one-day strike by Scotland’s CalMac ferry company. We were, in the…
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True confession: I have a favourite labyrinth. I absolutely love the Touchstone Maze in the forest above Strathpeffer in the Scottish Highlands. An arts project created in the 1990’s, it features standing stones imported from all over Scotland. Walking up into the woods this morning, we were shocked to see that danger signs had been…
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This is the Italian Chapel on the tiny island of Lamb Holm, Orkney, is a modern miracle that stands as a testament to the human spirit. Built by Italian prisoners of war in the 1940’s, it is loved and honoured today because of its ingenious hand-crafted beauty and the story it tells of faith and…
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Monday’s Post: You’d never know it was summer up here on Orkney. Fortunately, the rain was chased away by today’s chilly winds, so we dressed in our winter layers and spent the day amongst the island’s ancient monuments. The bleak and wintry weather made us appreciate the ancient people who were so ingenious in creating…
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We left the Highlands behind this morning and sailed to Orkney. The Hamnavoe is a lovely ferry, but I fell in love with this Lego model displayed in one of the foyers. It has been too rainy to get out and about on the island this afternoon, so we declared this to be a day…
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The dailiness of life fascinates me, and is, perhaps, the driving force behind my love of travel. How do people live on a day-to-day basis, what matters to them, how do they make sense of the world? Travelling along the edge of the world like this raises and addresses those questions as we stop to…
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We have arrived at the great Stones of Callanish. This part of the journey always feels hushed to me; I feel quiet and small as I stand in the presence of the ancient stones. They are so solid that I take heart from their patience and reach down to feel my own roots, and I…
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