For me, a keenly-anticipated holiday can have a bittersweet moment as it becomes a reality. Although I am always ready for some downtime, travelling doesn't usually fill me with the same sense of gladness. This year, my grumpiness was mitigated to obscurity by circumventing a ludicrously early start and treating the rest of the day as continuous birdwatching. We booked B+B on the mv Hamnavoe, so spent the first night of our holiday berthed in Stromness harbour, which meant that we didn't have to be up at stupid o'clock to pack the car and drive to the ferry. It also allowed me the opportunity to reprise a motif from a previous blog. Although there wasn't a kitchen sink or a pen involved, I woul d like to think that Dodie Smith would've approved. After a smooth crossing of the Pentland Firth, we set off from Scrabster, on the north coast of Caithness, at a leisurely pace, and turning west, not east like the majority of our shipmates. Just before Melvich, we took a t...