I had trouble getting to sleep last night, so I ended up sleeping in this morning. Nearly all B&Bs I have stayed in give you a generous time frame for breakfast, but this one wanted me down there at 8:00 am, which was just too early for me, so I skipped it and got a couple more hours of sleep.
Have I posted yet that daylight is extremely long in Orkney? Tonight, for example, the sun will set at 10:28 pm and rise at 3:59 am. It is really weird to wake up in the middle of the night and find out that daylight is here or fast-approaching!! On a positive note, it gives you a ton of nightly daylight if you choose to go out late.
The reason for all this daylight in summer is that this island is at the 58.9 N parallel, which is very close to the 59.9 N latitude of Oslo, Sweden! On the other hand, you will end up with extremely short days in the winter.
Below is my nemesis--the dreaded parking meter. Almost every parking lot has them, and you need to pay for your spot, get a little ticket, and stick it in your window. Last trip I made to the UK, they were using credit cards with chips in them, but our U.S. credit cards lacked these, so a lot of meters would not accept them. At that time, the typical fee was one or two pounds, which is a coin, and having adequate pound coins was often a problem.
This time, a few machines would charge one pound and accept a pound coin, but most now charge ￡2.40 for a two hour period. (That is a whopping $3.00!) And they want you to type in your car license plate and use a credit card to pay, not coins. The instructions, however, are not always clear, so I often have to get help. And this morning, I discovered that parking is free after 5 pm, and because yesterday afternoon I charged the full amount on the machine, it gave me a permit good until this morning at 11:00 am!!
The car park this morning was in the middle of Stromness, the port where most of the ferries from Scotland come and go from. I wandered around to some of the shops in this and one other street, then went back to the parking area and grabbed a sandwich at Julia's, which you can see in the parking machine photo. Very good sandwich, so as I was leaving, I grabbed one of the crab sandwiches for dinner tonight.
Roads like this, by the way, are exciting both for drivers and pedestrians!
And notice the sunshine in the photo below? It was taken just a few minutes
after the previous photos, but the weather changes extremely quickly around
here because of the constant wind. For example, it was raining as I
parked my car, but by the time I walked around town, the sun had come
out, and it was warm enough to sit outside and eat at Julia's patio!
I need to take more photos of funny names on street signs.
Always, a lot of these little construction lights, but they give me a second or two to take a photo.
Incredibly blue sky!!!
I stopped in this little port where there were ferries running to and from Rousay, the island you can see in the distance.
Speaking of distance, within the 10 minutes I turned around in the little port and drove back to the Stones of Stenness, the wind increased from maybe 15 MPH in the morning to 35-40 MPH. I pulled over into the parking space, and walked over to the stones, but it was just too windy. Even the sheep were bedded down in the grass to avoid the wind.
It is too small to read, but I included this because of the photo. The sign points out that the remaining stones were once part of a huge henge and circle of stones. Along with Slara Brae, this is one of the many World Heritage sites on Orkney. The stones are about 5,400 years ago, which could make it the earliest henge monument in the British Isles.
To put this into relevance, compare this age to the age of the following:
- The pyramids of Giza are about 4,600 years old.
- Stonehenge is about 4,800 years old.
The nice thing about this monument is that there is no ticket booth, no fences other than the one that keeps the sheep in the stone's enclosure from wandering onto the roadway, and no one to tell you not to get too close or to touch the stones! (You enter the enclosure through an animal-proof gate and watch out for the sheep manure in the grass.)
By the time I got here, the wind was ridiculous and made it feel a lot colder than I had expected. I found a gentleman to take my photo, but he and his family also stayed only a few very cold minutes.
I will come back here and take more photos if the wind gets better on Sunday. Tomorrow, Saturday, is supposed to have winds up to 52 MPH, so I am headed to a nice, warm indoor museum tomorrow!!
My Fitbit says I walked 4,899 steps today for 1.9 miles.
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