EOROPIE FREEDOM

I whacked my head into the wall this morning. It really hurt.

That though, is what happens when you’re quickly trying to repack your bag and you’re spinning around looking for something you’ve forgotten. Thump.

I’m alright. It’s just bruised and grazed really, but for a while I was thundering around the single room of the Park Guest House, palm pressed over the wound in case any brain matter might fall out of the gaping hole in my cranium.

The unbelievably packed rucksack

I have a first aid kit. Unfortunately it meant unpacking and repacking the rucksack a third time but I quickly swabbed the wound and stuck a plaster on it. I will live, brain intact.

It has been my last day though. I checked out of the hotel, shortly after 10am, leaving the bulging bag in the locked room for later.

At breakfast, a fellow lodger at the Park Guest House had been very chatty. He was from Aberdeen but liked to explore the western islands from time-to-time he said.

“Have you been to Luskintyre Beach?” he asked me.

“No,” I said, “I’ve only been here for a few days.”

“Ah you’ve got to go, it’s absolutely stunning.”

I looked it up on the map; really difficult to get to without transport. It’s near Tarbert (I had bus times to Tarbert from my contact in the Information Office) but too far from Tarbert to work out a route. Beautiful it may be; I wouldn’t be going.

“Ah maybe next time,” I said, with a smile. He gave me the standard look of someone who’s just been told ‘maybe next time’ by someone who didn’t mean there to ever be any such thing as a next time, and is completely aware that everybody in the room understands this arrangement.

That is a good question though. The standard question in fact, I always ask myself at the end of these expeditions. Would I come again? Would I revisit Stornoway and the Isle of Lewis?

I would like to. I’d like to visit the beaches on Harris, try the famous gin distillery, take a boat trip perhaps - but that’s a really different thing to actually doing it. And my life from now on will be in a different shape - it might not be possible.

I thought about all of this at breakfast while my newfound friend was extolling Luskintyre Beach as though it were in the Caribbean. But rather than heading South today, I had already made a plan to head north.

And so I did.

The bus was a coach. Figures eh: minibus west; coach north. Of course! Presumably the bus to Harris and Luskintyre (in the south) is an HGV.

Much of Lewis looks like this.

Anyway, the coach north rattled through the landscape. I could never have walked it. Treeless, windswept moorland stretches for miles between villages. Every now and then a dilapidated stone house with no roof flashes by. A barn, a row of houses perhaps, surrounded by acres of bleak field. Wind turbines spin slowly and the concrete road twists through their shadows.

The villages are made up of rows of smart-looking bungalows. At points, the sea tumbles away behind them and you can make out large glass windows. Many of them have flowers in the front; some have sheep sitting in the gardens. I wondered what it would be like to live there.

I got off the bus at a place called Eoropie. I don’t know exactly why. I was glad I did though; within a few minutes I was standing alone, miraculously alone on an enormous, sandy beach.

Eoropie. There’s no way to capture how alive it is here.

That was magnificent. The waves ripped in, huge and white; the wind was deafening and the sun painted the sand gold. It was so wild, so fresh, so beautiful. Plus it just so happened to be the furthest north I have ever been. A strange ocean (the icy North Atlantic) ahead, the moonlike dunes of sand behind, and not a soul in sight. I was loving it.

Sometimes life’s a bit like that. You stick to your plan, or God’s plan, and everything just sort of works out alright. Standing in the wind on Eoropie Beach was a real highlight, probably more so than the crowded rain-flecked trip to Luskintyre would have been. It all just kind of worked out.

I’ve been heading home since then. I got the coach bus back, mooched around Stornoway before collecting the rucksack and getting the taxi to the airport.

“Do you think you’d come back?” asked the taxi driver, remembering me from Thursday. Those same earrings still jangled against her neck.

“Yeah, I think so. One day, if I can,” I replied, truthfully. I was smiling under my mask.