@pfooti · 2026-07-02 · travel

June 30th to July 1st: Aberdeen to Lerwick

Purchased in Falkland. They did not have a book about the smaller ones.

AKA: I’m on a Boat post. On Tuesday, we packed into our vans and drove north. It was nice getting driven in the highlands - the roads were just as busy and the van just as wide, but this time a professional was driving. This is mostly a travel day, but we stopped in Falkland for lunch and some shopportunities. We stopped for lunch in this really cute RV park / campground / organic farm just outside of Falkland. All I can say about that is: I kind of wish we’d known about this place back when we had an RV. There were these preschool kids running around, learning how to use a see-saw (“It won’t go down!”). They were totes adorbs, but no photos because that’s creepy.

They used this town to stand in for Inverness when filming Outlander.

After lunch, back in the van to the Aberdeen Ferry port. We have an overnight trip planned to Shetland (we leave at 5pm and get in 7:30 the next day). I don’t have any photos from this time around (I’ll try to get photos on the return trip) but: it’s an okay ferry, we had beds that were decent, there was a smelly observation / smoking deck (smokers plus the diesel exhaust) but I did see some porpoises on the way out of the harbor, there was an okay cafeteria-style restaurant, and a premium lounge that we couldn’t access. Kind of unremarkable.

We spent a little time at St Ninian’s Isle. Whilst others swam in the ocean (no thanks) I put rocks on other rocks. I’m pretty proud of the one in the middle there that’s just three rocks.

Shetland is, to put it mildly, treeless. It is rolling hills covered in grasses and peat, with quite a few sheep (about 12 for every permanent resident). To say it is scenic is an understatement.

St Ninian’s in the distance. The fog had covered it when we rolled up (we could hear but not see the sheep), but there was a brief clearing before it came back. There’s a natural sandbar connecting that island to the main island, formed by ocean waves breaking both ways around the island and meeting in the middle. A standing wave of interference patterns made manifest in the depositing of sand.

At the end of the day we went to meet our oat (or “aets” in the local language) straw weaving teachers, where we wove skekler hats. I have so much to say about skeklers and some stuff I learned in general that I’m leaving that to tomorrow’s post, so you won’t get to see any hats today. Sorry - as I write this, I’m wrestling with awful hotel wifi, and am just not in the right mood to write.

Instead you get a field of buttercups from the Croft museum, where we stopped before lunch. It was instructive but not photogenic inside (everything was quite dark); I learned that the kids slept four to a bed box, and life was more or less constant work. I also later learned that the Shetland Reel (a dance specific to the island) evolved because dancing conditions were so cramped. The weather was unseasonably warm and calm, it really was gorgeous all day.

Apparently people come up to Shetland on a balmy summer day, fall in love with it, and chuck out their London existence for the remote island, all without really researching the entire year. Another thing I learned in the Croft museum was just how dark, cold, wet, and windy the winters are - you need to be able to dance a reel and have fun with neighbors in a tiny dark house, because that’s where you’re going to be four or five months out of the year. Most places I visit, I fall in love with - I think “I could move here.” But Shetland, no. I would love to spend more time here, I would love to come back at other times of the year and season, but I don’t think I could live here.

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