Scotland - Aberdeen to Lerwick

We had loads of time to make our way up to Aberdeen this morning as our ferry, Aberdeen to Lerwick, in the Shetlands leaves at 17:00.

We made our way to the centre of Aberdeen. What a wonderful City much akin to Edinburgh – big city with a local town atmosphere.

Aberdeen has a wonderfully gentle European ‘feel’, where the lazy shopper and the well-heeled businessman make lunch last an afternoon, whilst kids on jet propelled scooters whiz through traffic. Well that’s how it appeared anyway.

We rode around for a while trying to suss out Aberdeen’s parking protocol...is it cool to park up on the pavement or do you run the risk of looking like a prat as you peel the parking ticket off your screen?

Lunch was the order of the day and being in Aberdeen we thought we’d go for something really traditional, so we chose Italian?

We thought better of parking in the pedestrian zone, as no other bikes had done similar. We ended up parking them within eyesight of the small restaurant we’d chosen. This is always our preference.

Eating prior to boarding the ferry was a good plan, as you need a mortgage for the ferry food prices – well, they've got a captive audience!

We spent an hour and a half loitering about the ferry terminal but luckily the weather was great. We were last to board but once on, the boarding staff bustled around us trying to work out how best to secure our bikes. The worrying this was that they didn’t seem sure! This was not confidence inspiring. We tried to say how we would do them, but they were having none of it and told us they knew best. We hope they do!

Upstairs we quickly found a couple of seats and familiarized ourselves with the ship. The ship is very new, very clean and very expensive. We settled in for the long sailing ahead of us. Lisa tried to sleep in the seats; I chose the floor (the seats aren’t designed for anybody taller than Frodo the hobbit). All in all we had a crap nights sleep as a few seats down, some guy was doing his Harley Davidson meets the giant tractor impression. I didn’t know it was physically possible for anyone to snore that loud, to make it worse he slept from about 6pm through to docking. Nothing but nothing would wake him.

Lisa did, at one point, much to the amusement of the other passengers, go up to the man and very loudly said 'be quiet!' He did stop for a few seconds but then continued- it was hopeless. Trying to sleep was useless and dawn came round very, very slowly.