Skip to main content

That's it!

In the morning it didn’t know whether to rain or not. We put on wellies and waterproof trousers and walked a little further along from the end of the road. There was water everywhere but the emerging view to Jura and Scarba and also up the coast was beautiful.

There are so many islands and inlets that a map is needed to work out what is where. We never did see the Paps of Jura due to cloud but we could see over to Luing and Seil, where we were due to visit someone later in the day.

The marshy land off the end of the car park was full of standing water. As it drained over the edge, down the rocks and into the sea, it formed a great temporary cascade.




Below us, at a holiday cottage I assume, a few small children were crabbing off a small pier. They’d obviously caught something big because it was the squeals of excitement that first attracted our attention and binoculars that explained what was happening.

Moving up the coast towards Oban we turned to go to Seil. There’s the most amazing bridge and a convenient place to park, opposite the inn which is closed due to CoVID19.






We visited a friend from the LR4x4 forum at his house on Seil. It’s a sign of these CoVID19 times that he normally drives 30-40K miles annually as he moves up and down the west coast for work and yet this year he’s hardly driven at all. He’s managing forestry operations from the dining room table!

Later we drove to the end of another road, on the south side of Loch Etive, not far inland. Yet again it was a prime quiet spot. No waves, just a slow rise and fall of the water with the tide. Dawn spotted otters swimming past, just before dusk. That is a first and so a holiday bonus 😀


The drip came back but this time I was ready with a temporary countermeasure. The proper solution of sealant will have to wait.


We decided to drive home the next morning. The scenery is stunning in Autumn and we stopped for a photo, drove over ‘Rest and be Thankful’ then had coffee at Loch Lomond.

There we came across two intrepid Mums with kids 😱




Also we spoke to a guy acting as support for his adult son and two others. They had just arrived on road bicycles and were wolfing down porridge. They are on the last leg of the three peaks but cycling in between the mountains. Wow. ‘Way to go’ as they say in the USA. 

So that’s it. A trip in the cool season which lasted ten nights and it worked!
We will come back and we won’t wait ten years next time. 



Labels:

Comments

Rachel said…
Fantastic trip Tim. I've loved reading about it - thanks for your amazing blog.
I'm up next week on Thursday but will be on public transport so Hope based....x
22 October 2020 at 16:45
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On y va

Hooray. We are off. The ferry was booked a few weeks ago and the pressure was then on to get all sorts of jobs finished on the house and Landy. Major cosmetic work was to cover the grey front doors with paint that matches the rest of the vehicle. On the engine a coolant leak had developed behind the water pump and so the P gasket and adjacent core plug were renewed. Also a cheapy head unit from those Chinese people replaced the old Sony fm radio. Now we have opened up the wonders of Car Play and all that comes with it. Finally the 9th gen iPad with WiFi became a 9th gen iPad with WiFi and ‘cellular’. This means we can use OsmAnd Maps which need no data and get their gps position off the ‘cellular’ chip in the iPad. More on this useful map in subsequent posts. We headed towards Portsmouth for a mid morning ferry via our old neighbours in S-I-V. There we had a great few hours updating each about our families and then proceeded to save the NHS, the country and the world too. I mean why no...
Post a Comment
Read more

Escaping the weather

We stayed in Potes for four nights and during that time the weather was very hot, with the last two days maxima in the mid 30s. Bizarrely, last Friday night was one of the hottest, as at bedtime it was 27C and even in the middle of the night it was 25C. The forecast though, was ominous for the Picos (and worse for the UK) and so we made the best of the day by zooming up the valley to Fuente De. Here with perfect planning, we had booked the cable car for 10:30 and were whisked up in one cable catenary swoop, from 1,100m to 1,800m. It was sunny with wide views and we walked up a barren valley until we reached a steep scree-crossing path, where we turned around. Any further and it would have needed full kit and sleeping bags, as we were heading for a refugio . We got our fill of that high mountain and were back down in time to escape the mountains before the weather broke. The committee had decided that a city break to Leon was next and we had an overnight opportunity somewhere along ...
2 comments
Read more

Potes and environs

Potes is a bustling town that’s clearly ‘in the mountains’ but isn’t quite a mountain town. Well that was what we thought until we went for a walk. More on that later. First we got to know the site ( Camping La Viorna ) and the neighbours. After the squeeze of the first night near the pool, we were upgraded to a pitch at the end of the lowest terrace which had a superb view of the eastern massive of the Picos. So although this was still a squeeze pitch, somehow we felt good about it. The ‘squeeze’ happened later in the day. ☺️ Happily our immediate neighbours were quiet Dutchland people who like to eat their tea early and retire in good time. They always enjoy taking to us Brits, rather than those Germans and soon I was engaged because I was asked a question. “Why do you have a UK flag on your number plate, rather than a Welsh Scottish or English flag?”. Tricky! I explained that England isn’t a country like Wales or Scotland. They have their own  parliaments and make rules for them...
5 comments
Read more