Staying in Scotland

Since I haven’t written a lot about where we stayed and what we ate and so on in my first three posts, I decided to dedicate this one to those things. We booked our apartments for the whole trip on Airbnb, and since I haven’t had any experience with that, I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but more on that later. And because we didn’t stay at hotels, we had to cook our own food at the apartments, we only went out to eat a few times.

Let’s start with food. As mentioned in one of my previous posts, we did try a Scottish breakfast one morning, which I found quite delicious.

The one I had, you can see on the photo above, cost me around £5, which, in my opinion, is a reasonable price, considering what you get for your money. I’m sure there are other places that offer Scottish breakfast in the city of Edinburgh, maybe even better ones than we had, and maybe cheaper or more expensive ones, but we tried this one at The Breakfast Club. We brought some food with us from home as well, although at first I thought it wasn’t such a good idea, but I quickly realized, when we got there, that it was. 😀 Most of our meals we cooked ourselves, but a few times we decided to go out to eat as well, as I’ve already said. I thought we were going to spend a lot more money on eating out, but in the end we spent much more on buying food at supermarkets. The prices there seemed very similar to those here, in Slovenia, a little more expensive, yes, but that was expected. The times we decided to go out to eat, I didn’t think the food was costly, everything we got on our plates was well worth the money we had to spend for it. And everything tasted good as well.

Now, let’s focus on the apartments. I haven’t had any experience with Airbnb before this trip, but now, anywhere I decide to go, that will be my first choice to look for accommodation. All of the apartments were very spacious, some of them even bigger than we expected, with some space to spare. Of those five apartments we stayed at, I thought the best ones were in Inverness, even though this wasn’t really an apartment which we would have for ourselves, and in Uig on Isle of Skye. The hosts in Inverness were really kind and helpful in all the ways, even cooked dinner for us, gave us a quick tour of the city and before we went to bed, we all sat down in their living room, with their lovely golden retriever, had a taste of whiskey and they gave us some tips, what we should see on our way around the country. The apartment in Uig (you can see it on the cover photo at the beginning of this post) was the biggest one of them all, with the living room, kitchen, dining room and a room with a bunk bed (which we didn’t even use) all downstairs, and two big bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. When we arrived, we also met one of the hosts, who informed us that the washing machine was still working and he will come back to pick up their clothes a bit later. When he came back, he brought a bottle of wine with him, in his words, “to apologize for any inconvenience”, even though it really didn’t bother us at all, but hey, I’ll never say no to a free drink! 😀

On the other hand, our worst experience was in Glasgow. We stayed there for two nights, but our problems started a few days before we even got there. All of the other hosts were very responsive to any questions that we had, the owners in Glasgow – not so much. We arrived there relatively early because we had to drop the car off before 9 in the morning and we didn’t know what to do with our suitcases, so we tried to contact the host if it would be possible to just leave the suitcases in the apartment, as we wanted to explore the city anyway. We got no response until a few minutes before it was said we could get the keys. The apartment itself wasn’t all that bad, you could see that everything in it was new, except for the lighting.

Everyone that watched the news at the end of February/beginning of March will remember the storm that came over Great Britain, and some other parts of Europe, that they named the Beast from the East. That then prevented us from going home, since all the flights were cancelled for a couple of days, so we had to stay in Edinburgh for a little while longer. In the end, I went home three days later, while my friends left two more days after me. I wouldn’t go into many more details about it, you can imagine, the situation was pretty tense back then, although I might decide to say a few words about the experience in one of my next posts.

To sum it all up, we did spend quite a lot more money than we expected, sometimes we were really on the edge with our nerves, and as I got back home, I got pretty sick, but nonetheless, the trip was still amazing, with everything we’ve seen and experienced. My plan is to go back to Scotland some time soon, most likely in the summer, even though everything gets more expensive then, but it’s still cheaper than being stranded there because of snow. 😀