Hebrides 2019 - Days 11 & 12

Day 11

Early start to catch the ferry to Barra. This will be the last short ferry trip before the long ferry journey back to the mainland.

Barra is an interesting place. It's the only place I've been where the beach doubles as an airport.

Unfortunately we don't see anything land or take off. So we move on. We have less than 24 hours on Barra before the ferry leaves for Oban tomorrow morning.

The ferry leaves from Castlebay, so called because there's a castle in the bay. 

For a small free, you can have a look round the castle. Thank fully there's a water taxi included in the free.

 Once over to the castle, you're free to have a look around. We were the only people there.

As we were looking round the castle, I got a text message from CalMac, the ferry company for the trip back to the mainland tomorrow.

Ugh, that's really early. And I'd just paid for a bed in the hostel. Probably not even going to be there for more than 6 or 7 hours. Oh well...

So whist we're here, we ride over to Vatersay. Vatersay is one of the few places in the UK where you can ride a motorbike as a learner without having to complete the compulsary basic training (CBT). This is because it's too small to have a training centre and it's unfair to make people to the the mainland or one of the larger island to do the course.

The beaches here are stunning, if extremely cold.

Back to the hotel, and we unload the bikes. It felt a bit redundant seeing as how we weren't staying very long, but didn't want anything stolen from them as we were parked on the "main" road.

I check the ferry crossing using the wifi from the hostel (to get my money's worth - this was the most expensive per night cost so far since Glasgow).

Well I just hope they don't have to cancel the crossing. I'm supposed to be at work on Monday.

Looking back over the trip so far, I'm really happy with the little Honda. The fuel economy has been great. I've only had to fill up a handful of times (about 7 so far - each red pin in the map below).

Day 12

Very early start :(

The crossing was pretty rough, but I still managed to sleep for most of it. We got back into Oban for about 08:30-09:00. Pretty much as soon as we arrived back on the mainland it started to rain, and it didn't stop.

Tired, cold, and soaking wet, we stop in Carlisle at a supermarket cafe. We order some hot food and think about making a move, slowly dripping on the floor. We're soaked to the bone and this isn't fun. We decide that hiring a van on a one way hire was the best way forwards. However, it seems that weekend a lot of people wanted to hire vans. So it takes us about 2 hours to find somewhere to a van large enough (that is also from a chain so we can rent it one way). Eventually we do find somewhere.

I drop my riding buddy and his bike off near Birmingham and keep heading south.

 Not the way I wanted to end the journey, but it was really not fun. We'd been riding in torrential rain for 7 hours before we got the van.

I made it home safely a day a head of schedule (the return journey from Scotland only took one day instead of the planned two).