Oh, No! We had to leave Orkney!

We have had such an enjoyable time on Orkney. We highly recommend Orkney to any folks thinking of visiting Scotland and we highly our B&B. We so hated to leave to return to the busier life.

We finally had a chance to talk a bit with the host and chef, Mike. Very vivacious and witty in his uniform of black shirt with black and white checked pants and shoes. We talked about many things but he gave us our word for the day : MAMIL---middle aged men in licra describing some of the bikers they see on the island. Not a pretty sight He also mentioned something about the local police --they don't have hardly any on the island and every once in a while they send a couple over from the Scottish mainland but the minute they are spotted on the ferry, word goes out that they are coming on Facebook and every one knows. So he was aware of their presence the other day when Peter was pulled over for slight excedance in the school zone (yea, forgot to mention that 2 days ago, no biggy-just a warning , they were just waiting in ambush to make a quota and the GPS , which alerts us in Scotland to school zones, did not trigger ).

The morning was beautiful, although the wind is picking up but the forecast is for weather deterioriation later in the day.

We stopped at the Italian Chapel [ http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/eastmainl…] on the way to the ferry. It is a very impressive chappel built by Italian prisoners of WWII out of a pair of quansit huts and painted in the interior using tromp L'oiel [ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trompe-l'œil] to make the flat surface look 3-D. Really a fastantic to see what could be done with just paint and talent.

We arrived at the ferry about 40m before departure and we could see that the weather was starting to move in and the winds were up to about 15MPH. Crossing between the island back to mainland was a bit rough, but not really too bad. Wind had a bit of a chill to it. Arriving back on the mainland, we were struck with the amount of trees and the browning of the heather after traveling the green pastures of Orkney.

We traveled down to Wick to go to the Heritage Museum [ https://wickheritage.orghttp://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/wick/wick/ ] where we stopped on the way to Orkney and determine that there wasn't enough time then go through it so we made to time to stop on the way down today. Very interesting museum full of information about Wick and the heyday of the herring industry. Wick was the capital of herring industry and this sleepy little harbor used to have more than 300 boats moored at a tome with more than 1100 boats based out of Wick that would allow folks to walk across the harbor without touching water. They had a video of women gutting herring, they could process a single fish in 2-3 seconds. About a 1000 fish would be contained in a barrel and they were exporting more than 15K barrels a year.

After we left Wick we started to to drive into rain and we drove in rain all the way to Tain. Our lodging in Tain is the Morangie Hotel, a small, previously grand hotel near the Glenmorangie Distillery. Diane had a marvelous mixed fish pie with salmon, shrimp and haddack and Peter had a chicken green curry. At dinner we had a nice chat with a US businessman who used to live in US, but moved with his Glasgow born wife to Aberdeen 16 years ago due to rising crime in US. He works in the oil business and loves the work-life balance they have here.Read more