Aberdeen
I've already mentioned our last day in Lerwick in my first post as it made more sense to me to lump all that together, so the last travel info about our adventure has to do with Aberdeen. I wasn't able to get an earlier flight, so we arrived around 7am but weren't departing until just after 4pm. Still, we'd need to be at the airport earlier than that, and it was about a 45-minute bus ride, but that still gave us until just after lunch to hang out in the city. The Lonely Planet didn't have a lot of recommendations for Aberdeen. It's kind of like the Fort McMurray of Scotland, for those of you familiar with that city in Alberta. There's a lot of oilfield activity there except in offshore petroleum operations. Things are comparably as expensive as they are in London, as a result, and even the Maritime Museum near the ferry port was mostly about their oil industry than it was about anything else, so we weren't too interested in that. What we ended up doing was going on a coastal walk.
When we initially arrived in Aberdeen on our way to Shetland, we had a couple of hours to kill, and as the ferry terminal was right by a railway station attached to a shopping mall, we wandered around for a bit in the mall. We went into one store, where we got to talking to one of the staff, who as it turned out had actually done an exchange program in Calgary and had lived there for 6 months, so she was really excited to meet a couple of Albertans. She had given us some recommendations for things to do there, and one of them was to visit Greyhope Bay, which apparently has a café and from which you can do dolphin watching while sipping a coffee. This sounded quite attractive, so I looked up how to get there, and I found out that it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. That was quite disappointing. However, I figured the café must be somewhere that you could just sit outside and perhaps still see the dolphins, so it seemed worth trying, especially as this person we met said that you're pretty much guaranteed to see dolphins there. So we hopped on a bus again and then started walking toward where the café is, which also happens to be adjacent to a golf course. In the process, we discovered there was a coastal path that we could walk, so we decided to do that since the café was only a point to help guide us to get somewhere and not our actual destination. I don't know how anyone sees dolphins from that place since it was pretty high up off the shore, but being closer to it on the coastal path did not allow us to see any dolphins either, unfortunately. We did see a couple more seals pop their noses up out of the water, and we saw lots of birds, an old and new lighthouse, and more beautiful coastal views in beautiful teal-coloured water. It was also sunny and warm out, and it was lovely just to sit in the sun and enjoy the warmth while listening to the sound of the sea.
We had walked for a while to get to and from this place, even with the bus, so at this point, we decided just to go back to the mall and have lunch and hang out until it was time to leave. We were also a bit hot since we hadn't really dressed for the warm weather. Lerwick is usually grey and is prone to frequent bouts of rain and drizzle, so we had prepared for that type of weather. It was a short but sweet visit, even if I didn't get to see dolphins.
Our trip to Shetland was really lovely. There is lots more that you can see and do, but most of that requires a vehicle, which we didn't have. So the few days we spent there was the perfect amount of get a taste for the culture and landscape. It's somewhere I'd go again if I could! Here are the photos from our little stopover.
I've not been able to include any photos within the text here to help break it up; I think Wix has really pulled the plug on my little workaround of copying and pasting photos so that I can at least make my post look prettier and break up the text a bit. But this is actually my official last blog post from our life in the UK anyway, so it's time for me to wrap up using Wix now that it gives you almost no privileges with photo files whatsoever. I hope that you have enjoyed my stories and have learned something along the way. I really feel and appreciate the privilege of being able to have lived here and seen and learned so much. It has sometimes felt like a dream: I got to travel, attend interesting events, meet important people such as Marina Wheeler (ex-wife of Boris Johnson) and even Princess Anne, and help a lot of people along the way, from kids at the school where I worked to Government of Canada and military staff coming in with pets, to helping increase diversity and inclusion initiatives at the Canadian High Commission and my work with the military family support service in Europe, and doing it all while living on the Thames in Central London, waking up to a view of the London Eye each morning (cranes and construction notwithstanding). Within this dreamy life, there have been challenges, from family illness to the deaths of my dad and our cat, and my teaching job tried its best to take a toll on my mental health, but we have persisted. My life in Edmonton might not be nearly as exciting, but our adventures there will just look a bit different, and I will enjoy them just the same, for different reasons perhaps, but it will still be as valuable. May you take every advantage and enjoy all the adventures your own life brings your way.