Friday 29^th April

Roel writes

We left a little late on the Friday night because of work. But finally we hit the road around 20.15 towards our first Land Rover Show in Gaydon, Warwickshire.

We arrived at the campsite around 22.30 and we noticed that there were quite some people there already. Loads of Landies with roof top tents and such. The campsite seemed to be a lot smaller in the morning then it looked like in the evening. Strange. The darkness made it all look different and gave it the wrong impression.

After breakfast in the Motor Heritage center we had a wander around the show. It was nice weather and it seemed very quiet. We met Tjeerd of Nene Overland (www.neneoverland.co.uk) and he gave us the jerry can holder which finally was black powder coated (we had to wait for this a little)

In the afternoon we met Richard and Camilla on the campsite who came from London also and are planning a same sort of overland trip but then towards South Africa. We decided to meet up later and have diner and some drinks later together.

We went back to the show and bought a Coleman stove. This is a stove you can use on normal unleaded petrol. These are very handy in foreign countries because you do not have to have all different connections to fill up you camping-gas bottle.

We tried it out and could not get it to work properly so back to the guy who sold it to us. After some trying and fiddling, we managed to keep it going and it seems that you have to get the hang of it after a short while.

We met Camilla and Richard later on and they had arranged to meet some friends at the show as well. Georgie and Tim were from London as well, and Tim used to drive overland trucks in Africa for a tourist-overland company and he went in 2002 overland to Kathmandu on his motorcycle.

We had a great and boozy night together.

The weather in the night was not really great. Thunder and lightning and a lot of wind. The roof tent of Camilla and Richard was flapping a lot, because it was about 10 years old and it came with the Land Rover 110, 200Tdi they bought for their trip. It kept them awake most of the night while we had a good night sleep. I must admit that Lizzy woke up in the night because of thunder but I almost (I was poked awake) slept through it.

Sunday 1^st May

Roel writes

We are always travelling very light. We noticed that again on Sunday morning when we had just a quick cheese sandwich and ready for another day in our live. The other 4 made a whole English breakfast. It took them so long that Georgie gave up on making eggs as well. Fed up with it all bacon sandwiches had to be enough for the rest.

We had a quick wander around the showground before setting off towards Skipton in Yorkshire. We arranged with Louise, who is a very good friend of ours, to meet up at her mums and Davids (her husband) house.

We arrived late afternoon and had some English scones and tea.

After a walk through the countryside we had a great diner and had a nice couple of glasses of wine before going, happy, to bed.

Monday 2^nd May

Lizzy writes

All our good intentions about getting up early and heading for the Dales before the bank holiday crowds came to nothing. We did wake up at seven, but just turned over and, before we knew it, it was ten to nine!  Oops - I blame the second (or was it third?) bottle of red wine.

We scrambled out of bed guilty and were pleased to find that Louise was still in her pyjamas as well!  After a typical English breakfast of cereal, toast, orange juice and tea, we headed off at last, given a fresh urgency by Davids claim that his highly-tuned long-range hearing indicated that the car park at Grassington was filling up!

Grassington turned out to be a really picturesque, if a bit touristy, village full of typical Dales stone houses.  We did a round-trip walk from the car park, through the village, down a hill to a bridge and along the grassy banks of a wide, leisurely river, before heading up a steep narrow path back to the car park.

We drove slowly back towards Skipton, by a round-about route taking in several small, pretty villages.  Entering Skipton itself, we hit a bank holiday traffic jam, which made me think of London for the first time in three days.  Luckily, Skipton's a lot smaller than London and we didn't have to be patient for very long before finding a spot to park and setting out to explore on foot.

The main shopping streets were as busy with pedestrians as the roads had been with cars, partly due to a Monday market taking up most of the pavement.  Most of the stalls seemed to be selling the kind of clothes you wonder whether anyone's grandmother still wants to buy - there was one proudly displaying a vast array of enormous flannelette nighties and all-enveloping pants!  That and the flat cap stall proved to be the major highlights of the market.  We soon moved on to have a wander across the garden at the front of the church and peer across the barrier into the courtyard of the castle (quite interesting but not interesting enough to pay for!).

Having had enough of the crowds in the main streets, we made our way through the back streets down to the canal, lured by a rendition of the Kenny Rogers song 'The Gambler' by a live band as part of the Skipton Waterways Festival.  Some of the canal boats were amazing - brightly coloured and covered in flowers and flags.  Roel was particularly impressed by a plastic float keeping 4 cans of Guinness cool in the canal...  Not that he likes Guinness, but clearly it had potential to be adapted for Heineken.

Back at Louise's mum's house, we all lunched on bacon sandwiches and elderflower cordial in the sunny garden before Roel and I said goodbye to Louise, Liz and David and headed north in our Landy.

Surprisingly quickly, we found ourselves on the M6 and it was only another couple of hours to Glasgow.  We turned off a few junctions before Glasgow, to head up through Lanarkshire and see if there was anywhere we fancied camping on that side of Glasgow.  Driving through Lanark, Wishaw and Motherwell, we were struck by the ugliness of the towns after the beautiful Dales villages.  It was clear that we weren't going to find anywhere picturesque to camp there, so we just kept going towards Glasgow to pursue plan B - camping in Strathclyde Country Park, just outside Glasgow.  This turned out to be a pleasant enough campsite, though within earshot of the M74.  Total bargain at £4.25 for both of us for a night!

We set up camp and started making spaghetti bolognese on our Coleman stove.  Halfway through, I thought things were taking a bit long to cook and discovered that the stove had gone out - looks like our various experiments in lighting (i.e. flooding) the stove used a bit more fuel than we'd thought!  So dinner ended up being cooked over the barbecue instead!  This was quite handy as the barbie made a good camp fire to huddle round later and finish off our wine!

Tuesday 3^rd May

Lizzy writes

We woke up to the sound of rain on the tent.  Lingering in bed for half an hour, it didn't seem to be getting better, so there was no choice except to get up and face the prospect of packing the tent up soaking wet.  We needed to get going, as Roel had an appointment with a client in Wishaw.

We managed to get there by 10am, though we spent a good ten minutes driving round the industrial estate trying to find the right office.  I spent an hour and a half sitting in the Landy reading about Scotland and listening to BBC Radio Scotland hoping for a weather forecast, while Roel went to drink tea with the people from Fielding, just putting faces to names and generally doing HV's business a good turn as we happened to be passing.

On the road again, Roel made a few calls to lorry drivers and the office in London - I guess once you've started thinking about work you can't just switch it off!  After sorting a problem or two, he turned his attention back to the holiday and as we drove north from Glasgow we turned to each other and said 'OK, the holiday starts here'!

And it did.  Shortly after Glasgow, we began driving through beautiful scenery - passing Loch Lomond and the Trossachs, we headed on up to Fort William and drove the along the Great Glen to Loch Ness.  At one point, we opted to take a back road and ended up driving alongside the Caledonian Canal - an enormous and brightly-painted boat (part canal barge and part ship) came into view round a bend in the canal and we stopped to take a photo.  Our next stop was in Fort Augustus, at the head of Loch Ness, where the canal drops to the loch by a series of locks and a pretty row of restaurants face onto the locks, including one called the Neuk café, which caused a certain amount of amusement (even if you don't understand Dutch, I'm sure you can guess) and naturally required a photograph.

A few km further along the loch, we arrived at our campsite for the night, with pitches facing straight onto the loch shore.  We picked our pitch and checked out the facilities, then drove back up to Fort Augustus for a meal at the Lock Inn.  We were amused to find that about a third of the people in there were Dutch - we watched as they ordered half pints of lager all round and made comments (in Dutch) about the weird British habit of drinking beer in pints!

When we got back to the campsite, we started putting our tent up, only to discover that we had an enthusiastic audience watching from the caravan next to us!  We already knew they were Land Rover enthusiasts from the fact that there were two parked next to the caravan and they came over to chat and have a look inside the tent.  It's the first time people have been openly curious about the roof-tent, which I find quite surprising as it is pretty unusual and we would probably have been really curious if we'd seen one before we knew what they were!

It was beginning to get dark and the cloud cover created a strange effect on the hillside opposite, turning a large patch of hillside bright orange for a few minutes while the rest was in semi-darkness.  We went for a short stroll down to the campsite's beach before going to bed, but it was too chilly to linger and we soon went back to the tent and to bed.

Wednesday 4^th May

Roel writes

We woke up around 6 a.m., and the sky was bright blue and a lovely sunshine made us nice and warm in a few minutes.

We were lying in bed with the front of the tent open and overlooking Loch Ness and it was just fantastic.

We made a full English breakfast before hitting the road again. Destination today was Ullapool. It would be the most north we would go on this trip in Scotland.

Ullapool was not very far and we arrived before lunchtime already. We decided to stay and settle ourselves on the campsite, which was very conveniently located to the town centre. It was located at the sea side which meant there was quite a lot of wind coming from the sea hitting our Landy and tent.

At that moment we didn't think too much of it.

We had a long lunch in a nice pub and asked the staff if we could charge the battery of our lap top. This wasn't any problem and meanwhile we were reading some newspapers.

We went for a walk beside the beach and into town to do some shopping.

The afternoon was more or less spent in the pub. We had several pints in several pubs. The pubs were all funny in there own particular way. The people in every pub were all characters. Before we knew we had about 6 pints and still had to eat. The weather wasn't very nice, so went into a pub for dinner and after that we went back to the campsite.

Thursday 5^th May

In the night it started to storm! It must have been about gale force 9 to 10 at some point. We had parked the car with the nose into the wind, which meant a lot of wind and rain straight on our heads. It was really bad and the tent couldn't cope with the water and started to get damp on the inside. With our pillows pushing against the tent everything got damp. Lizzy was afraid that the Landy would blow over on his side. We rocked through the night!!

The tent was flapping and making a lot of noise. What a difference we were experiencing compared with the weather we had in the morning at Loch Ness!

At 4 a.m. we decided to pack up and leave. We couldn't sleep because of the noise anymore anyway.

The packing up was not easy with this storm and we got very wet. After we put our £10 through the letterbox of the reception we drove off, only noticing that about 10 miles into the country the wind was almost not existing.

I pulled into a lay by and we snoozed in our seats for about an hour and a half before heading towards the Glenfiddich distillery

We arrived around 10 a.m. and we had a free tour and tasting. Very touristy but luckily at this time of the day not very busy yet. We drove through distillery country of Speyside. There was suddenly a nice parking spot with a lot of warm sunshine. We unpacked our stuff to let it dry for about an hour.

Lizzy writes

Back on the road again, we drove through Ballater, past Balmoral Castle (well, we could just glimpse a flag flying from the castle from the road) and to Pitlochry.  On the outskirts of Pitlochry, we stopped (in a village called Moulin) to have something to eat at the Moulin Inn.  It had a really snug bar, the first place resembling an English pub that we'd found in Scotland.  The food was delicious too.  Unfortunately we were still a bit too tired from our lost night's sleep to sample the beer, which was brewed on site.  Luckily, it turned out that the pub in the village where we were planning to camp was run by the same people, so we would have a second chance to sample the beer (after a restorative snooze) in the evening.

Friday 5^th May

Feeling much better, we packed up our tent and set off southwards.  Sticking to the main roads, we arrived in Edinburgh after a couple of hours.  As Roel had never been before, we decided to park the car briefly and have a bit of a wander round.  It is a beautiful city, though a bit spoiled by tourism - we spent a good five minutes trying to get away from a bloke trying to sell us a CD of monks performing rock songs with Christian lyrics (which he advertised as 'monk rock'!!).  We only escaped because he finally believed that we had no cash when Roel showed him his empty wallet!

A quick glimpse of the castle and we hurried back to rescue the Landy from the over-zealous parking wardens who were swarming all over the streets.  Heading out of the city, we stopped at a service station and Roel decided to wash the car, which turned out to be a learning experience - we now know that if you squirt water at a certain place on the bonnet it pours into the driver's footwell!

The rest of the afternoon was taken up with driving south (over beautiful countryside in the Cheviot Hills) via County Durham to North Yorkshire.  We chose to spend the night on the edge of the North York Moors, in the Hambleton Hills.  We had a pleasant pub meal in a Samuel Smith's pub (£1.32 a pint for bitter!) in a village near the campsite and went to bed early in preparation for our early departure for London in the morning.