I love train travel; I don’t care about the trains, don’t get me wrong, but I love using them to get from a to b. Faster than a car, and you can read a book! What more can you ask from in a mode of trasnport? I get travel sick in cars and coaches, so even as a passenger I can’t do much more than stare out the window.

The train journey from Glasgow to Oban was one of the most beautiful I’ve ever taken. We had to be on the train for 8:10 am, not my favourite time to start travelling (considering we had to leave the hostel at 7:30 – this was a lie-in free holiday!), but once we were settled in the only thing I could have wished for was to be in the restaurant car of a stream train. It’s the kind of landscape best accompanied by a nice glass of wine and hot dinner. Mountains, waterfalls, lochs, the Atlantic, forests, moorland… It’s like someone took the Lake District and said “it’s nice, but don’t you think it could be a bit… bigger?”

I’m a great lover of boats, too, so I enjoyed the ferry ride from Oban to Mull. My main experience with islands has so far been the Isle of Wight, which sits on its own off the South Coast, so skirting our way through the Hebrides was an interesting experience for me; you saw nothing even approaching open sea. Shame, but it still had the same spectacular views we’d seen from the train, so I wasn’t heartbroken!

I’d found out the day before that it was 20 miles from the ferry port to Tobermory, where we were staying (thanks, oh friend who neglected to mention that til then!). Since I was struggling to climb the stairs on the ferry without swearing (not the best knees in the world) I went on strike again, and took the bus. They’re mostly big coach style buses on Tobermory, so they’ll take bikes in the under-seat compartments. We pulled halfway out the port and stopped, because the driver had spotted an otter nad pulled over so we could all have a look!

The driver was great, like a tour guide, and regailed us for an hour with facts about Mull, his life history, and the prices of some of the houses we were passing. Mull is an expensive place to live! It really did take an hour to do those twenty miles – a lot of hills, very heavy rain, and naturally we had to stop to pick peopl up a few times! – and it took another two and a half for me cycling friend to join me in Tobemory, at which point he swore off cycling any more too. In the intervening time I had a poke around Tobermory, including the Mull Museum. It’s a tiny place, free, apparently run by one  man. The usual hodge-podge of country social history and world war two, but with geology and ship wrecks thrown in.

Thanks to neither of us being up to cycling any further (still wasn’t doing well with stairs), and the nearest attraction we wanted to see being thirty miles each way we hired a car. We saw Duart Castle (where they filmed Entrapment) and we visited Iona, where we saw the sun for the first time since arriving on Mull! Did I mentioned west coast of Britain? And North Atlantic? There’s a reason it’s so lush and verdant. Rain! Apparently the rest of the UK was in glorious sunshine, but to be honest I can’t say I minded. Well, not as long as I wasn’t cycling!