D. woke me up first thing in the morning to walk down to the car and call the rental car company. My phone was nearly dead and we didn’t have reception at the hotel.
I didn’t want to wake up. It had been a rough night. The room was as hot as a sauna all night from the uncontrollable radiant heat. I woke up in a sweat when D. opened the windows to the 40 degree air. Then between the two of us getting up to use the bathroom across the hall and the stupid decision to sleep with my contacts in my eyes because I didn’t have my glasses, well .,, it was a long night. D. thought he had bed bugs.
I had ripped the contacts out of my eyes and so was now nearly legally blind. D. helped direct me down the hill to the car and we called the rental car company.
“I need help sorting out a situation,” I began. “Sorting things out” may be my favorite British expression. Anything feels manageable with that phrase. “We will just sort this out and then have a cuppa.”
I’ve learned from BBC that pretty much anything can be dealt with if you have tea. Cousin just found dead in the garden? Let’s have a cuppa. Son just drove your car off a cliff and not by accident? You just need two sugars in your tea. All better then?
So the young woman at the airport knew my language and said, “Could you just give me five minutes to talk to my colleagues about this and I will ring you back?”
Of course.
When she rang me back she had spoken with the mechanic who would be calling us at 9:00.
So when Karl from the local garage called he knew right where we were. “Across from the distillery next to Housi Field, right? I drove by it on my way in this morning.”
Karl arrived, made a few “this is not good noises” which D. later said to me he hopes never to hear from a medical professional, took the tire and promised to be back.
Meanwhile we walked back up to Saxa Vord for tea and coffee and I watched an inane game show blind where a man was asked to name five of the top ten craft beer brewing countries in the world for 2500 pounds and he answered India! India! “I knew it was a wild card,” he said.
Karl rang back and when we went down to meet him he was putting on a new tire. “Lucky we had this,” he said. “We don’t normally sell tires but a car was in this weekend and we had a tire we could use from it.”
But here’s the incredible part. He told us that our tire was irreparable because it had been punctured by a bone.
“A bone?”
”Yeah,” he said. “The bonxies kill rabbits in the field and then the crows pick up the bones and drop them in the roads to break them and get the marrow out.”
We stared at him in astonishment. I told him about our encounters with Bonxies and he chuckled and then showed us a large scar on the back of his head.
He said he had been fishing when a Bonxie hit him in the back of his head and knocked him unconscious. He said they will fly into you at 40 mph. Guess we were right to scream.
We got back on the road again and headed south for the ferry. Our checkout on Yell was supposed to be at 11 but I called the owner and explained the situation and he was kind enough to let us check out in the afternoon.
I should be clear. Everyone we met on the trip was friendly and helpful. Even the people we didn’t think would be and we were counting our lucky stars we could drive back south without too much trouble.
I was still blind, of course and spent a good 10 minutes trying to find the car again after we stopped for fuel and coffee. But anyway we made it back to the chalet in due course, washed up, packed up and headed south for Lerwick where we were staying the night in another AirB&B.
It was good to see a new part of the mainland and have eyes again but as soon as we got to Lerwick I took a nap. The night had been exhausting.
I knew D. would want fish and chips again for dinner so we walked about a mile to the downtown area of Lerwick and ate steamy fish and chips again outdoors.
Dinner and a movie was the plan. We walked over to the Mareel, a modern cinema, theater and arts building to watch a showing of Fisherman’s Friends, a movie about 12 Cornish fishermen whose sea shanty songs were discovered by a London music producer and they hit the pop charts unexpectedly.
It was so good! A completely feel good movie that was set in Cornwall in the same village where Doc Martin is filmed (another of our BBC favorites). If you get a chance, see it.