View across the Outer Harbour of Stornoway

Thursday 5 January 2012

Wednesday 4 January

My journey back to Stornoway went quite smoothly. I started off by travelling to Schiphol Airport by rail, a journey of 75 minutes. You have to be at the airport 2 hours before departure time, meaning that my presence was required there by 7.30 am.

The plane took off a little after 9.30, and arrived at Gatwick just over an hour later at 9.35 (local time).

Bewl Water
The aircraft was put into gate 104, which leaves passengers with a 15 minute walk to the customs point. Then you have to go through the security rigmarole again before you end up in departures once more. The flight to Glasgow, from gate 55B, left nicely on time at 11.35, and delivered us in Scotland 75 minutes later. It was a wee bit bumpy, and you couldn't see a thing due to cloudcover below. Glasgow was wet and windy. An hour later, the weather had not improved as we departed for Stornoway from gate #1. I had not been looking forward to sitting in seat row 3 (which has a blanked out window), but the stewardess very kindly asked me to move to seat row 10. I didn't mind at all, as I wanted to have some view. What view?! Just white clouds all round. Upon arrival near Stornoway, the aircraft kept going north to make a turn round back south. There was a strong southwesterly wind blowing, and planes have to land into the wind. We were there at 3.15. I was very kindly offered a lift into town.

Over northern Lewis