Cancelled flight

As forecast, the sunny weather was a mere memory when we woke this morning and it was raining for most of the day. We thought nothing of this, feeling that we had been lucky with our two days of sunshine, and didn’t suspect that it would have an impact on us later. We checked out of the hotel and James went for a Distillery tour while I went to the Antlers Café and read my book. James joined me for a coffee there after his tour, and then we caught the ferry back to Islay - more terrifying reversing onto the wee ferry for me! We went to the Islay Life Museum in Port Charlotte, which turned out to be a great place to spend a bit of time on a rainy day. It had all sorts of objects from the old days on Islay; butter churns, a ship’s whistle, old Christening gowns (just like ours!), a cradle shaped like a boat, old agricultural tools and much more. It also had information on how World Wars 1 and 2 had affected the island; as well as young men dying on the battlefields of Europe there had been a bad air crash and two military shipwrecks in the 2nd World War which had unfortunately resulted in many deaths, quite a few American. The islanders had rallied round to rescue the survivors and bury the dead, for which they were praised by the American President. There were also old photographs of Islay life; dances and theatre productions and school days and milking competitions. We both found it to be fascinating. Back in Bowmore we had a mid afternoon coffee before heading to the airport. It wasn’t until we arrived that we found out that our flight back to Glasgow was cancelled because of low cloud. I had received a text message forty minutes before but hadn’t seen it. James, who knows a lot about aeroplanes, was surprised that it had been cancelled; the cloudy weather didn’t seem all that bad. However there was nothing that we could do, and more unwelcome news was to come; the morning flight tomorrow is fully booked so we won’t get home until the evening. This meant that we have had to cancel a curry at Rasoi with Heather and Ewan that we were both looking forward to (the company as well as the food of course!) To be fair to Loganair they booked us into a very nice hotel in Bowmore and arranged to transport us there by minibus. We decided to extend our car hire in order to give ourselves a bit of independence tomorrow, and set off to the welcoming and newly refurbished Harbour Hotel’s apartments, which are very smart and clean. So here we are, unexpectedly still in Islay.