Independent overland travel through Africa in a Unimog called Moglet

Todays route took us south to Stornoway to find ourselves an internet cafe or library (Jason is having fun and games with his bank having cancelled his switch card for some random reason) as well as getting ourselves ferry tickets for Fridays trip back to Skye. Once there, we needed to get a wiggle on to get back to the Lakes in time for Monday morning and Atkinson Vos.

Naturally en-route we manage to find the time to have a little look at something shown on a OS map - this time its a Homestead (ie a larger group of stones that used to be a house and outbuildings plus surrounding wall). The slightly odd-but-good thing about this one is when they cleared the site of peat to reveal the stones, they left a small area alone so you could get an idea of how deep it used to be and what the whole hill looked like. It was good as it helped to be able to visualise the size of the clearing task, but also kind of odd that you're allowed to stomp all over the homestead ruins which are thousands of years old, but a pile of peat is all fenced off!

One last stop on the road was for a site on the OS map marked 'arch'. Normally these are on the coast as a natural rock formation, but this one turned out to be whale bones! Apparently the bones are the lower jaw bones of a blue whale that was removed from a beached whale in 1920. The harpoon in the centre of the arch was still (gruesomely) in the whale but the explosive charge that would normally have the killed the whale hadn't gone off. Amusingly though, the whale and harpoon were discovered by a local crofter who then took the harpoon into his shed, where it promptly exploded! Fortunately for him, he wasn't in there at the time :-) Not sure what he did with the whale... Pretty damn huge, and a kind of odd choice for your front drive, but it takes all sorts I guess...

Arriving in Stornoway we made a bee-line for the ferry port, thinking that if nothing else, it'd have parking spaces plenty big enough for us.

When we arrived, we went into the terminal and had a chat with a not particularly helpful woman behind the counter. The upshot of our discussion with her is both Jason and I had managed to mis-read the ferry timetable brochure and we couldn't get a ferry to Skye on Friday! We'd already calculated this was pretty much as late as we could leave it and still be certain we could get to Atkinson Vos in time for first thing Monday morning. So our only option was to drive all the way down to Leverburgh and get a ferry to Berneray, and then a couple of hours later get another ferry from Lochmaddy to Uig on Skye. This managed to double our planned ferry costs, force us to leave the islands a day early so we couldnt do a walk we'd planned to try and eagle spot, as well as make us have to drive more in one day than we'd planned. Still, looking on the bright side, if we hadn't asked the question we'd have turned up at Tarbert tomorrow for a ferry that wasn't ever going to arrive, and the next one would have been on Monday, which would have meant we'd miss out MOT on Wednesday and it'd all start to unravel pretty quickly.

Tickets purchased (£94 for the both), we headed into town to find the library. Happily, their internet access was free for an hour, so we had a machine each and caught up on some emails and sorted a few bits out. We then bought a few essentials in Tesco and headed back on the road, making our way to the car park by the cemetary we stayed in a week or so ago, as this was a place we were familiar with, we knew we could sort Moglet out there, and was only about 15miles from the ferry terminal for the next day (8.30am sailing so no lie in!).