Isle of Mull

I mentioned we took a weekend trip to the Isle of Mull, and it deserves its own blog post, if only to tell the story of our memorable car journey around the Island.

The Island is known for its wildlife, with many visitors going on photography and sightseeing tours to see the puffins, and basking sharks etc. But for us, we decided to check out Duart Castle, as this had been one of by goals visiting Scotland – to get a good photo of a castle. To be honest I actually got the best photos on a visit to another castle – Kilchurn castle, when Vivian took us on a separate sightseeing trip near Loch Awe. But after catching the ferry we headed to Duart castle and learnt about its history and read the stories about the Maclean clan who it belongs to. The stories and the way the family lived I found pretty interesting, as well as the fact that it had been used as a backdrop to the movie Entrapment with Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta Jones.

But this was where the fun really began…After taking some photos I found Louise in the tea room chatting to this Father and Son from New York who I had a quick chat to earlier at the ferry terminal. After hearing that we were heading to Tobermory by bus, they offered us a lift, which we jumped at. He warned us that the rental was quite like his Mercedes he had at home and he wasn’t quite use to the gears being on the opposite side etc, but we didn’t think much of it. As we got began to leave the castle our worse fears began to be realized – the father was a horrendous driver. He slowly backed out before slamming it into first gear and revving the hell out of it, before peeling out of the gravel car park onto the one lane drive way. It took some maneuvering every time we were confronted with oncoming traffic, and each and every time he would rev first gear into oblivion. By the time we got to the end of the 2km driveway, the clutch was smoking and smelling something horrendous. We then headed to tobermory which was an hour away on windy and often one laned roads. He proceeded to drive well to the left and in the ditch, and complained he couldn’t tell where the car was on the road without looking in the side mirror! When we were approached by an oncoming car he pulled into a passing bay which unfortunately was on a hill. He struggled to get it going as he couldn’t hill start and proceeded to slowly roll back towards the car behind us while he was again revving the hell out of it. The car behind us thought he better pass us, and then he got offended and started going off at the car in typical (verbal) New York style as it went past. By this stage Louise and I just wanted to get to Tobermory and get out as we both thought there was the strong possibility of being in a crash that day. Finally after an hour of white knuckling it, we saw the sign for Tobermory. We were relieved to have thought that we had finally made it – wrong! He asked his son whether to go left or right around the roundabout, to which the reply was right. He chose neither, and went straight over the top of it! After more panicking we finally made it to Tobermory where I jumped out and offered to help guide them into a carpark. Was terrifying stuff!

Other than Duart Castle and our ride from hell, we just ate fish and chips, went for a walk at a really nice park near the town, and then waited out the storm to see if our ferry had been cancelled. Needless to say, we caught the bus to the ferry to head back to Kilchrenan.