We have had a day at sea after leaving Dover and are now docked at Invergorden, about forty minutes from Inverness by the local train. Invergorden is an old port town and used to be a base for the Royal Navy’s fleet until the mid 1950s, the old oil tanks sit in a line on the hill above the town. North Sea oil came to the rescue for the town as well as cruise ship tourism. Inverness, the Scottish Highlands and Loch Ness are just down the road from the port.

We decided to stay in Invergorden rather than going further afield. Slobro was a bit disappointed that he wouldn’t see Nessie and jealous that we had seen the loch creature when we last here. No need to see it twice. Slobro had to accept a cool Highland Cow encounter instead.

We again had a nice sunny day to wander around the town for a few hours looking at the murals recounting the past. Allthego and Homealone like murals. The only thing though is that they tend to dwell on the past glories of places. Is it ‘old times’ for ‘old memories’. Maybe it would be good to have futuristic murals as well?

The local museum also had the usual array of things from the past. The local distillery’s former drum major uniform was rather good.

Back on board the ship we sailed away down the port past some oil rigs and out into the North Sea headed for the Shetlands and the port of Lerwick. Some good views of the town and highlands as we left.

Overnight the weather turned rather foul, no rain but fog and some strong winds. Arrived off Lerwick but the ship was unable to get into the harbour, we were going to use shuttles to get to shore. Too dangerous, so unfortunately the Shetlands had to be abandoned and we departed for a day at sea and set off for Iceland.

We have been on the Shetlands before so it wasn’t a big blow, some onboard though were very disappointed but accepting of the decision. We have now started stage 3 of the journey, from Dover to New York.

The course to Iceland was to take us around the east of the Shetland and then north west over the top of the Faroe Islands out into the deep North Sea.