After locking down the route I was going to take during my tour around Scotland it was time to make the first reservations and start booking rooms at some hotels.
As one of the first longer stops of my tour, my first priority was to book a hotel on the Isle of Islay: I had stayed at Carl and Jan Reavie's Port Charlotte Hotel before, so it was the obvious choice to return to. I booked via email, but you can also book online via a website. The hotel is in a very nice conservation village overlooking Loch Indaal. The rooms are furnished with nice antique furniture and to my knowledge all have windows with a view over the sea. You don't have to go far for dinner either, as the hotel also has a very good restaurant. The food is produced locally, I remember eating excellent beef, lamb (which I'm normally not too keen on) as well as seafood.

Next I started with some of the ferry reservations:
First the ferry from Kennacraig to Islay and back. This ferry is run by Caledonian MacBrayne. You can book online, which works very well. I was able to book the crossings using the Mozilla browser I normally use. The only thing that seems to be missing is an email confirmation of the reservation.
Then it got a bit more complicated, I had to book the ferries for my visits to Orkney and Shetland. Until 1st October 2002 these are run by P&O Scottish Ferries. Unfortunately I wasn't able to use my normal browser here, so I switched to Internet Explorer. But then the booking system worked very well. It was very easy to check out my various options for this three leg "round trip" (Scrabster to Stromness, Stromness to Lerwick and Lerwick to Aberdeen). And after completing my booking I received an email confirmation.

With the basics done it was time to start turning my attention to mobile communication, to enable me to update this site while I will be on my tour...