It all turned out fine

We've turned up on Shetland with a whole pile of our usual 'equipment'... but unfortunately owing to the weakness of the wifi signal in the cottage (lovely cottage, though...) we won't be able to make much use of it. It's presumably to do with the fact that Shetland is somewhat at the end of the road.

First impressions? Really positive. Lerwick is obviously an interesting little town with all the services you really need. The Shetland Museum is a stunning place, and it is built to a Scandinavian, not a UK standard. The toilet facilities are wonderful examples of attention to detail - detachable small toilet seats, low level basins, and little stools for little people to stand on to use the hand dryers. And while it was opened in 2007 (by a party of royalty including the King of Norway, significantly) it looks as if it opened earlier this month. Things look as if they are really well looked after here.

And since we have only seen 1.5 hours of sunshine in Edinburgh between the beginning of July and the day we left, and about 140% of the monthly rainfall in the first ten days, as we've already seen quite a bit of sunshine here today and it hasn't rained, it seems a pretty good deal to me.

Now we aren't particularly good with birds, but when one is as friendly as this little chap was on Victoria Quay it's hard to resist taking a portrait. We think he's an artic tern, but I'm sure that someone will correct me if we were wrong.