Goodbye Baltasound and your inebriating goodness.
With heavy hearts and complete nausea we find ourselves once again homeless after spending just over 2 months living, working, and drinking at the Baltasound Hotel on Unst. In a lot of ways, working at the Baltasound has been perfect for us – Ize got the chance to use his web design skills to craft a new website for the hotel, and I got to use my love of writing and drawing to put together some promo material and logo designs. I am super stoked that a logo that I created from scratch (admittedly Ize helped me with Adobe Illustrator) is going to be plastered onto the side of a building, t-shirts and mugs. How cool is that! I feel like I’m pretty much famous. I’ll share pics of the logo once it’s gone into print so you can all congratulate me/send me gifts etc. But it’s been pretty cool looking back over the pages of initial sketches to the full colour vector-based final version. A new career perhaps?? A man can dream…
Not only have we got to do that fun stuff over the last few months, but we had the chance to see the other side of a hotel room, restaurant and bar – the view from the staff. We've all drunk in bars and eaten in restaurants more times that we can count, and we have all sat there at one point or another and gone ‘Where the hell is the waitress/barman? Why haven’t they taken my order/returned with my drinks/cleared the table/poured my drink faster/processed my credit card faster etc etc etc, Why, if I worked in a bar/restaurant I’d make sure no one went hungry or thirsty!’. It’s easy to throw stones when you are sitting on your fat butt eating and drinking, but when you stand on the other side of the bar it’s a whole different world. I have also had the pleasure of cleaning up vomit (twice) in the bar toilets, cleaning and making up hotel rooms, scrubbing pots and pans literally for hours, serving food, and I even poured one beer really badly (we had to scoop several inches of foam out to make room for the other half of the beer).
So in conclusion, if you have never worked in hospitality or in a service role, please be respectful, patient, and most of all - be kind to the staff serving you. It’s the least you can do.
OH and the chef taught me how to poach an egg…sooo I’m like, basically a chef now.
We left Shetland on Saturday via ferry, and this time we splurged and got a cabin as we somehow managed to have waaaaayy to many libations the night before (I swear I don’t know how this keeps happening) and the thought of not being able to sleep made us yak (again). We are hiring a car for a week and will drive around the top of mainland Scotland and the highlands before we start our next Helpx on the Isle of Skye. Our first stop is Aviemore in the highlands, where we sample a little ‘glamping’ in an ‘eco-pod’. No, we have no idea what an eco-pod is…it was the cheapest bed they had. We’ll let you know. Then we will head down to Fort William and Glencoe..so keep your eyes peeled for some shit hot photos.
Steve, Sharn, Amie, Kate and everyone else – thank you so much for everything!! You guys are awesome & will be much-ly missed by these two homeless, lazy travellers.
