Not fit to be out on our own....

I woke up at 3.30am this morning in the hotel and realised that I had not brought my (Edinburgh) house (and work, and bike) keys. I didn’t think of them yesterday when going through the things we needed to bring, but nor did I see them to jog my memory in their usual place, which is my drawer of bits in the chest of drawers in the kitchen, which I did go through to find things like my passport, the spare car keys, and other things that needed to come to Edinburgh.

When I woke up in the night I decided that the keys must be in that drawer, as that is where they normally are, and not in any other place, so we got up at 5.30am and left in the dark and drove back to Tain. Not the direction we wanted to be going, but at least it was a stunningly beautiful drive. Pink light over the mountains and the Cromarty Firth. Inversions. Everything. We have never seen that before as we’ve never driven that segment of the drive at that time of the day.

We got to Tain just after 6am. The keys are not in my drawer. Oh. We searched all the luggage we had taken with us, as well as other places they might have migrated to in the cottage like my bedside drawer. Nothing.

I eventually located the keys in a “safe place” in my pill bag, which I had in fact been carrying the whole time. I.e. it had gone to Inverness with us. We should have searched the luggage in the hotel, not relying on my assumption the keys would be in my drawer. As we left the cottage, Alf decided not to bring his dark shoulder bag and I queried whether he needed to bring a camera. He then had an oh bugger moment. His jacket and camera from yesterday were still in the hotel room. We’d managed to leave them behind.

Back to the hotel at 7am…. Still quite stunning light. Collect the jacket and camera, still in the room, and leave the hotel in time to get to the Newtonmore Grill (Truck Stop)  just before it opened at 8am. Stuff faces with truckers' breakfasts…. Quite the morning. A trip back to Tain for something that had not in fact been forgotten, and then another diversion back to the hotel for something that was forgotten, but largely because we left the hotel room in a hurry and without putting all the lights on.

Everything has been dull since then. We are back in the flat in Edinburgh. All seems fine except my neighbour who was watering the plants obviously didn’t notice the ones on the kitchen window…. Not sure they will recover….but you never know. Starving them of water rarely seems to be as terminal as over watering them.

We wandered over to Leith Walk for some shopping. Everything seemed so busy. In fact, even Inverness seemed very busy yesterday....I've done some washing and sorted out my wet swimming gear from yesterday (I had half a mind to do that when we unexpectedly went back to Tain, but that would have delayed us needlessly, so I brought it back here). Blipped about the events of yesterday. There were plenty of those (events). Had a very short sleep, but it seems to have helped me a bit. Made sure my bike is fit and ready for use tomorrow. Restarted my peloton bike (which had logged me out), and made sure it had done any necessary software updates. And now I'm counting down the minutes until I can retire to bed!