Tag: Kilconquhar

St Monans Surprise; One Night In Edinburgh; A Fight With Agoda Looms

September 15th, 2022

TODAY HAS BEEN one of those “mixed bag” travellers’ days — excuse my use of the vernacular — that variously thrills, frustrates and fucks one off beyond all measure; a very satisfactory excursion to St Monans this morning was followed by a frustrating little episode in Edinburgh, but these pale in comparison to a spectacular own goal booted by travel booking website Agoda, which can look forward to a report to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for its trouble.

As the song says…what a difference a day makes…

She’s been gone for a while, regrettably, but late British singer Amy Winehouse should still be heard. She’s nailed this.

Readers will recall that I stopped in the tiny hamlet of Kilconquhar, in Fife, last night; it was more or less the last stop on the road, with tonight being spent in Edinburgh ahead of handing back my car and flying down to London tomorrow afternoon; there was a “job” to do — as much to slake my curiosity as that of a friend of mine in the States — and so, after an earlier-than-industry-standard 10am checkout, I drove the 2.5 miles from Kilconquhar to St Monans (also known as “St Monance”).

The village of St Monans at low tide, in sunlight, looks different to a highly stylised version available elsewhere (below).

Same place, different conditions… (Picture: supplied).

I’m sure people can spot the differences…a dead low tide (so low the rivulets on the floor of the empty harbour (see below) were still draining to sea, as a swell of water was beginning to push into the harbour from the sea) makes a lot of difference to a landscape shot like this one; the weather was lovely in Fife this morning, which also migitated against getting a killer replica of the image my friend and I had seen before I left Melbourne for the UK.

I’m in no way disappointed, though; it was a lovely little town, and I enjoyed a coffee in the cafe (the blue building at the left-hand side of the top picture). Some places have many faces, and this is one of them.

Dead low tide in St Monans, Fife, Scotland: these boats aren’t sailing anywhere. For several hours, at any rate.

Edinburgh was, in fact, a mere 49-mile drive from St Monans, and for once Uncle Google’s assessment that it would take one hour and 18 minutes was very near the mark; in truth, I stopped a few times to stretch it out, given I couldn’t check into my accommodation until 3pm, and in any event still arrived two hours prior to that despite my best efforts.

It wouldn’t have mattered.

I’m staying in the Broughton Street Lofts, leased by Destiny Scotland (and if you come to Edinburgh, you should stay here too); it’s a wonderful property — could I live in it perchance? — but seriously, it’s central, smack-bang in the middle of a very reasonable food precinct, and with shopping and public transport options well within walking distance.

The leasing company made me aware at the time of booking of parking at £17 per day “nearby;” it turns out there is a small carpark behind the apartment building, as I discovered on a call to them to check a different detail. Was there vacancy in it? There was! That will be an extra £15 for the night, thank you…which I grimaced a bit at paying (I’d paid for the apartment…shouldn’t parking be included?) But having paid £13.20 to park in an adjacent street for three hours, the £15 overnight rate was a bargain…

…until an email pinged on my phone an hour or so later to say we’re sorry, but our car park is full (WTF? Shouldn’t there be one space for each of the six apartments? Which, as it turns out, there is). But don’t worry — we’ve refunded your credit card (you’d sure as shit better have) and we recommend a car park near Edinburgh Waverley train station, where you will get 20% off all parking by showing any correspondence relating to a booking with us.

Oh, good…

…until I spent some of my three hours’ paid kerbside parking walking to Edinburgh Waverley Station (about a mile and a half, mostly up a fairly steep hill) and realised that tomorrow morning — with a 70lb suitcase, laptop bag and backpack, I’m going to be an irretrievably sweaty, stinky mess by the time I get my hire car out of there…for £19 after the discount.

I’m not going to not recommend the property; but I simply say to people that if you come here, book parking at the time you book accommodation and if the Destiny Scotland website doesn’t let you do it, ring them, and don’t stay here if you have a car unless you have a parking confirmation when you book the apartment.

It’s as simple as that. And if they give you jib…tell them where to insert it, and book something else.

I had a nice dinner at The Broughton, and it was sensational (albeit with small portions, as I’ve come to expect in Britain); but that’s all I have had time for. So much for time in Edinburgh, and no small thanks to Destiny Scotland buggerising around with its parking policies (both onsite and a ridiculous distance away).

But all of this pales in comparison to the accommodation I had booked near London Heathrow for tomorrow night and the night thereafter.

If my time in Edinburgh was already cruelled by Destiny Scotland, it was fucked over completely by an inadvertent discovery.

When I started booking this trip — desperate for a holiday after 14 years without one, desperate to be back in Britain, and desperate for the benefits some “own time head time” a decent break might yield, I wasn’t so concerned about the final act; if I’m going home anyway, who cares? So I booked a night at a hotel on a freeway close to Heathrow, in which I would likely stay awake all night and get cleaned up at 4am, ready to be at check-in at 6am for my 9am flight.

My airline — Etihad (with which I am extremely satisfied in every respect except this one) saw fit to defer the flight by 24 hours: so I booked a second night at the same hotel.

Through Agoda.

But the Novotel London Heathrow Airport is CLOSED: until 2023, I was told this afternoon, when I called the hotel to enquire about the shuttle bus running between it and the airport (and thus the London Underground train station in its basement).

There is no booking, the Novotel told me.

I have confirmation of two nights’ stay from Agoda.

Agoda charged me £200 for the two nights, and debited the money.

But the hotel is closed.

The Novotel says it advised accommodation aggregators it wasn’t accepting bookings and couldn’t honour those taken, but I was never refunded.

Agoda — which I have satisfactorily used to book shit previously — has neither a phone number nor email address to contact: its clear intention is to behave as a law unto itself.

It isn’t hard to see where this is going; when I return to Australia, either my travel insurance company will extract the money from Agoda, or the relevant government agency will be sooled onto Agoda for an unbelievably flagrant breach of Australian consumer laws, given the sale was made in Australia.

It cost me $600 to replace the two nights’ accommodation: I was lucky, given the people pouring into England (many with no good reason whatsoever) on account of the death of Queen Elizabeth last week.

I’m going to hit the travel insurance company up for the $600, too.

But there IS a silver lining, despite the unwanted expense; the replacement hotel is in Chiswick (a favourite London suburb) and unless my flight is delayed by more than two hours, it opens up tomorrow night to do something.

In short, the dinner at Roast my illness shortchanged me out of three weeks ago.

And it gifts me Friday in London (although the original hotel booking did that too): still, I can go and get stuff relating to Big Ben and the Tower Bridge that my nine-year-old son wants, and a silly hat with the Union Jack on it for my daughter: the rest of the stuff they wanted, when I asked what they would like from the UK, is already safely in my suitcase (or waiting for me at home, thanks to the Royal Mail).

What a difference a day makes 🙂
Swapping Grey Aberdeen For Tiny Kilconquhar

September 14th, 2022

Kilconquhar Castle Hotel: a final stop before heading to Edinburgh to commence the long trip back to Melbourne.

IT IS, in effect, the last stop on the road; the driving holiday that began 17 days ago with a 90-minute departure fiasco in leaving the London suburb of Chiswick to kickstart the longest trip to Kent in recorded history has brought me to tiny Kilconquhar, in Fife, in south-eastern Scotland.

Tomorrow I head to Edinburgh, where — after a night in that august town — I will hand my hired Hyundai Ioniq back to the good burghers at Europcar, and board my British Airways flight to London for a final 42 hours in my equal favourite city in the world.

I think readers got the picture yesterday that I wasn’t too impressed with Aberdeen; oh, I’m sure it’s a great place, and certainly the people I met there were friendly enough. But it’s bleak: aesthetically depressing, with lots of drab grey buildings, and not a lot to recommend it. Even the list of “Aberdeen’s Top Attractions” left in my room by the serviced apartment manager had just six nondescript items on it.

Yet after I hit the road this morning to head to Dundee, and thence into Fife toward Kilconquhar, everything changed very quickly: see below for an example of the views that rapidly sprung forth as I left old Aberdeen behind.

12 miles south of Aberdeen, this typified views that punctuated much of the rest of the 91-mile drive to Kilconquhar.

At some point tomorrow morning (and not long after I start driving), I’ll pass the 2,000 mile (3,200 kilometres) mark for this trip; I have often said Britain is bigger than it looks, and by the time the car is handed in at Edinburgh Airport on Thursday, there will likely be another 150 miles or so added to that. My 2008 visit to the UK, which featured a similar road trip (going to mostly different places than I’ve been this time), clocked up 2,320 miles, so the distances covered are close to identical.

And one will say something nice about the lad from Europcar, who I was certain was trying to pull something shifty when I picked the car up; claiming to feel bad because he made me wait (it was to go to the toilet because he’d had “a bad curry” two days earlier), he charged me an additional £15 per day for the hybrid, which was unexpectedly available (still a discount of about £20 per day on that model) on the basis it’d save me hundreds of pounds’ worth of fuel.

He was right: I will have spent £300 on fuel in total, plus the extra £285 for the car; a conventional car (like the Vauxhall Astra I was apparently to be given, instead of the Fiat I’d reluctantly booked) would have used at least £1,000 in petrol, so whichever way you cut it I’m about £400 better off: nothing to be sniffed at, to be sure.

Anyhow, my final night on the road (which is what it is: Edinburgh tomorrow is the end of the line) has taken me to the tiny, charming hamlet of Kilconquhar, in Fife; I am indebted to a friend in South Carolina for planting the seed (and she knows who she is), for tomorrow morning before I head back down to Edinburgh, I’m off to a little seaside spot called St Monans — also known as St Monance — to get photographs.

Both of us thought the place looked stunning, so I’m getting the pictographic evidence, and I’ll share it with my readers as well as with her. St Monan’s is only a few miles from Kilconquhar, so with luck it will only take about 5-10 minutes to get there. But we’ll see.

Most of the drive down from Aberdeen was uneventful, and smooth sailing; I even made it through the labyrinth that passes for through roads in Dundee without any problems, eventually emerging onto the Tay Road Bridge. But as has happened so often on this trip, a turnoff initially toward St Andrews (to which I didn’t go) heralded the start of more micro-roads, unsigned turns, and trial-by-error navigation.

The 1.5 mile Tay Road Bridge spans the Firth of Tay, and replaced the Tay Ferry in 1966. (Picture: The Scottish Sun)

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve enjoyed the slightly anarchic flavour these roads have imbued my trip with; the uncertain prospect that each little turn eschewed, or every missed crossroad, was actually the correct decision. Yes, they’re slow, difficult to navigate, and potentially dangerous, but they add another colour to a driving holiday that six lanes of traffic travelling at 70 miles per hour simply can’t compete with.

The main street of Kilconquhar, Fife.

The charming little village of Kilconquhar (and it is little, as one can see above) is — despite being in Scotland — almost the stereotype of a little English country town; one street, one pub, a church, a couple of other small businesses, and a road in and out. It sits on the shore of an eponymous lake — Kilconquhar Loch — which is visible through the graveyard of the church, as I found out this afternoon while wandering through the township to see what’s there.

Kilconquhar Church cemetery is better kept than the one at St Martin’s, Bladon. Note the loch through the trees.

The fact is that thousands of these little villages and townships are scattered across Britain; unlike some of the tiny country towns in regional Australia that have become derelict, as people have drifted toward the coasts, most of these are vibrant, well maintained, and engender tremendous loyalty from their residents. The need to regularly travel further afield for provisions is regarded as a mere fact of life, and accepted without quibble (for example, the guy who runs the Foyers Bay Country House, where I stayed a couple of days ago, told me he goes to Inverness for supplies “most days:” a more onerous undertaking than jumping in the car and going to the local Coles).

The Kilconquhar pub plays into stereotypes of English country villages, too — even though it’s in Scotland.

Anyhow, that’s where we’re at for today; I’m very tired again, as lots of driving (with great attention required) and lots of walking are having their combined effect.

But I’m not complaining: I signed up for it, and it’s just what I wanted. I feel better than I have in some time, and well rejuvenated. As I said last night, I’m ready to go home (even though a big part of me wants to stay here too), and that’s a good thing, and for all the right reasons.

I’ll post again tomorrow when I’m in Edinburgh: hopefully with some very pretty pictures of a very pretty seaside town. If the mission to St Monans is a success, that is 🙂