This was always going to be a difficult day – a six-hour-and-change drive to Edinburgh from the Isle of Skye, including a 30 minute sojourn down single-track roads.
But first – our least favourite part of staying at a vacation rental – emptying the mauve recycling bag into the taupe bin, draping the linens across the laundry room in our best impression of the Taj Mahal, and spinning windershuns three times before hiding the keys under the garden gnome with the eyeglasses but not the garden gnome with the pince-nez.
I jest – but the overly-intricate leaving instructions remain the biggest single argument against renting an Airbnb. I realize the owners have a limited window for turnover, but I will pay a premium for any vacation rental that says, “Don’t worry about taking out the garbage. We will handle it. You are on vacation.”
That said, Dark Skye Cottage has some of the more basic leaving instructions – we simply have to drop off the garbage and main recycling in a clearly designated bin, and run the dishwasher. No special instructions for linens or towels.
I do, however, take some photos of the Cottage just to be on the safe side. Our hosts seem like perfectly reasonable people, but you do hear some horror stories of people getting charged extra cleaning fees for no particular reason.
We have also arranged to purchase some of our host Sally’s lovely art, too – and she even ships to Canada!
This is helpful, as we could not possibly add so much as a postage stamp to our already-overweight luggage.
We even manage to get on the road at around 8:45 am, almost 15 minutes earlier than expected. And that 15 minutes might just end up saving us a hundred dollars.
You see, I failed to honour the Car Rental Commandment: Thou shalt not book thy rental to be returned at the last possible moment, so that they rental company does not chargeth thee a late fee.
I had assumed that we would be back in Edinburgh by 2 pm, whereas in reality we will almost certainly be closer to 4 pm. Normally this would have result in an extra day’s charge – despite us having effectively already paid for the full day already.
I try calling the Edinburgh Budget office, but get rerouted to corporate – who chastise me for not calling the Edinburgh office. But they do helpfully agree to forward a message to Edinburgh requesting that they pretty please not charge us extra.
The only bump in the road during our departure is an inordinate amount of rain, and our MG’s decision to not close the rear hatch for any reason whatsoever. Even after adjusting it, it just beeps at me. But I do manage to close it manually. Will the electric latch work again after we return it? Guess we’ll find out!
The single lane track is surprisingly quiet this morning – very few cars or sheep out on the road, which we suspect is largely due to the heavy rain. We do come across two caravans parked next to each other on a passing place, which seems a cheeky move – but one of them clears off after a few moments. I don’t even need to honk my horn.
The drive back is lovely and scenic, but with its share of twists and turns. We see one “Blind Summit” sign after another:
If only we could take a peak! (Photo Credit: Wikimedia)
(Inspired by the following twitter account:)
In any case – we all feel a bit sad to be crossing the bridge back to the mainland:
We can’t help but feel we should have spent more time in Skye
The drive is also somewhat stressful, owing largely to the challenge in finding somewhere for lunch. I’ve written about this before, but trying to find a restaurant that caters to four different tastes is difficult at the best of times, and near impossible when you’re working to a strict location and schedule. This is particularly challenging when driving across Scotland because a.) so much of it is rural and b.) so many restaurants don’t open til 12 pm.
While I drive, my wife finds the perfect restaurant that we will pass before it opens, the perfect restaurant that isn’t actually on our route, the perfect restaurant that we won’t reach until 2:30 pm, and finally – the perfect restaurant, full stop.
That’s how we end at Faith’s Cafe:
We are on a timeline, and – despite it being a sit-down restaurant – they manage to get us fed and back on the road in 40 minutes. And look at these dishes!
Chicken burgers:
BLTs:
And pancakes:
Oh, my!
We also needed to get out of that car after more than 3 hours on the road – and with 3 hours left to go. And I desperately needed a coffee:
Back on the road. Eventually the rain clears off:
But the timeline is still looking tight – it’s saying a 3:30 pm arrival when we have to have the keys back to the rental desk by 4 pm – but we gradually shave more and more minutes off the timeline until we’re closer to 3:15 pm.
We also do a bit of research into transfers between Edinburgh airport and the city of Edinburgh, but there aren’t really any good options. We can either hope against hope that there’s a ‘people mover’ taxi capable of carrying our bags, or we can go with a rideshare like Uber. But to get a rideshare we’ll have to go back to the main airport terminal ride share pickup up point- which would be quite the hike from the rental car drop off.
But there’s nothing for it but to leap into the great beyond, and hope we can catch the proverbial trapeeze bar rather than fall to the distant lions down below.
We carry on toward Edinburgh, and the roads become wider and faster:
It feels like there should be a sign: “Now leaving wild Scotland.”
We continue to race against the clock – and for once, we win. Even with the added challenge of navigating to the Avis / Budget dropoff lot – the only lot not specifically listed on Google Maps – we make it back with time to spare. Better still, no hassle from the return agent and no extra charges for the late drop-off.
We ask about catching a rideshare, and he suggests we head to a nearby Hampton Inn so we have somewhere to wait indoors. Brilliant idea – except we can’t quite find how to get into the Hampton. Time’s a wasting, so we pick a road and drop a pin near the Moxy hotel. There’s a painful delay as we await a response from Uber, but then we get the news:
Your driver will arrive in 23 minutes.
Ughhhh…
The Budget agent’s final words regarding us “having somewhere to wait indoors” now seem markedly more significant. On the bright side – the Moxy hotel has bathrooms we can use. And we have a full mini-van on the way, so at last we won’t run out of space. And it’s stopped raining.
The only real mistake we make here is that we drop our pin on the narrow road outside of the Moxy, and not on the parking lot – so there’s a brief scramble to move the bags from the sidewalk to the parking lot. But we do eventually get everything loaded in:
And we waft our way to downtown Edinburgh. There was a recent fire on Princes Street that has snarled traffic, but our drive still takes less than half an hour.
On the subject of wafting, our son remarks about all the different smells coming in through the windows – shops, and wet grass, and a hundred different restaurants and cafes, all rolled into one. Not sure if we’ve encountered that anywhere else.
We arrive shortly after check-in time at our vacation rental in Edinburgh’s new town.
And what a rental it is:
The amount of space here is ludicrous. Counting the kitchen, there are three distinct seating areas and four full bedrooms.
The kids are happy to each have their own room for once:
And the bathrooms are decent, too:
Though we do wonder if we perhaps went a bit overboard.
That’s the funny part about booking a vacation rental upward of a year in advance – we sometimes forget the rationale for picking a particular place, and so we arrive to find that it’s smaller, or larger, or more grandiose, or otherwise different than we might have imagined.
But we are in and settled, and have no real complaints – other than the observation that this townhouse was clearly renovated to be a vacation rental, while Dark Skye Cottage feels much more like someone’s much-loved home. The workmanship and attention to detail at our Isle of Skye accommdations was next-level, while our place in Edinburgh is just fine. Only some of the knives are broken.
Off to the nearby Co-op to pick up some groceries, and then back to the Co-op again to pick up fajita shells and pasta. It’s not as well-stocked as the Co-op on Skye, but we manage to find everything we need.
Walking back to our rental, I take a moment to soak in the bustle of Edinburgh and the old-meets-new-architecture:
We only have a few short days here, and we intend to make the most of it.