On the way to and through Scotland

People sometimes ask us why we sold all our stuff and moved into a van to tour the world. Well, it’s easy… this way we always have a different view from the kitchen or bedroom window…

Sometimes we start to wonder ourselves why we left everything behind, but it are the small things on the road that remind us that live is a journey filled with all sorts of adventures. Sometimes the ‘adventure’ is very small but essential, like finding a place where we can refill our water supply or finding a shop or toilet (well the toilet we can always do without, but it is still nice from time to time to have some…)

The other thing I’ve noticed is that everyday stuff you do at home can take a whole day when you are on the road, like going to a shop, sending an e-mail, finding a place to take a shower. We worked out a construction for the last thing, using one of the rear doors of the camper, a solar shower bag, and a toilet tent to shelter us from the freezing Scottish winds… We also tested our tent to put in front of the van, but since the ground was too hard, we had to break it up again.

Life slows down a lot when you are on the road, you wake up, you fall back asleep, you wake up again and notice it is getting a bit late, you try to find your clothes in the very small closetspace above the bed, one of you gets dressed while the other one is forced to stay in bed because there is no room, the second one gets dressed while the first one steppes outside, you look for a bench outside where you can have breakfast, meanwhile you wonder where would be a good place to go to the toilet and you pick up the map to look where you are going next… Life can be hard…

Between all this soulsearching and hard work, we managed to see a bit of the great Scottish countryside. Although it is cloudy most of the time and it rains a lot, we do have a real warm feeling about the scenery here in Scotland. It’s a great combination of mountains, lochs, sea and lush green grass.

We wanted to go to a small island off the coast, but the road was a floodroad, so you could only pass two times a day when it was low tide. When we got there, it was still high tide, so we decided to go further on foot towards the island. Halfway there however, it was lowtide and so we grabbed a ride back to the van, picked it up and drove to the parking lot near the town where we took out our steps and rode the last bit into town.

We have had some very nice campingspots even though there are not a lot of opportunities here in Scotland to just park the van overnight. Everything is fenced off and there are few places where you can go off the main road. At one place we had some very woolly neighbours that wouldn’t shut up all night long…

We ended up on the Isle of Skye, which was really to our liking, certainly the northern part with the small and windy roads. We picked up a hitchhiker and took him back off the island, so here you have it Richard, we mentioned you… 😉