The weather has finally caught up with us, it’s pretty miserable outside and Andy is ill, so we’ve booked ourselves into a lovely B+B on Islay, one of the islands of the west coast of Scotland. I thought I’d take this opportunity to update things a little as it’s nearly a month since I wrote anything.

Where to start? The randomness has continued. We began our Scotland leg of the trip on Arran. Beautiful 25ish mile long island, “Scotland in miniature” it says in our guide book. It does seem to have it all. Beautiful beaches, seals, deer, eagles, lots of ancient sites, standing stones, forests, rivers and mountains, the tallest of which, Goatfell (2868ft!) we climbed for Andy’s birthday. Anyway when we arrived we took a wrong turn looking for our campsite, stopped to ask a lady for directions and she told us we could camp the garden at her B+B for the same price as the campsite if we wanted, but then decided that as it was raining and the para-gliders who were meant to be staying hadn’t turned up we’d might as well just stay in the house! She showed us around the house, which was lovely, and told us we could, “sleep where we liked, eat what we liked and pay what we liked”! Somewhat bemused by this offer Andy and I went to the car to collect our things and ended up staying for 5 nights.

Patsy was a really lovely lady, she had lots of good advice of places to walk and things to see, on our final night we all had dinner together, we made her the famous “Laura Pike Pie” and she told us the amazing tale of how she’s arrived on the island 30 years ago with her 3 small children and only what she could carry. “It was like Robinson Crusoe, a real adventure” she said. People from around the island helped them out bringing them the various things they needed, like knives, forks and plates, and they settled there. They’d lived in a caravan on the beach for 6 years, collecting welks occasionally for a bit of money until they finally moved into the old coastguard’s cottage, which was where we stayed. It was on the cliffs of Kildonan at the south side of the island. Anyone thinking of of a trip up north, or going to Arran I would really recomend going to stay there, it’s a lovely place, there are some booking details on her daughters paragliding website, flying fever, you can also see her own website where you can see some of the portraits she does here.

We went to a couple of creameries while we were in Arran, which both had visitor centres. Don’t get too excited if you go to visit though, there is no guided tour or interesting information on the different cheese production techniques, you can just stare thorough a window at some one dipping cheese in wax or at a big machine stirring milk. Still there are always lots of samples to try, my favourite was just the plain cheddar at the Torrylinn Creamery in Kilmory, so creamy, mmm.