Scotland

We spent a blissful 2 weeks at Bernie and Estrelita's, in Livingston, chilling out and informally house-sitting their lovely home while they were in the USA.

Bernie and Estrelita's house in Livingston

View from their front door

This reflective time allowed us to review how we were doing on our walkabout and we decided that prolonged periods of camper-vanning, with short overnight stops wasn’t ideal for us. We decided we need to spend longer in an area, and occasionally we need to have our feet on the ground, with a clean toilet at hand [hence the fab-u-loos reference]!

Out of this review grew the idea of formal house-sitting. So all systems go, we planned to line up a few sequential house-sits in France, Portugal, Spain and Italy, our intentions being [if we got such assignments], to spend a few weeks in each place, and to fill in the gaps between assignments in the van. So we subscribed to 2 online websites and started creating a website of our own, as a forum to advertise our services. Other than the text, we needed pictures to illustrate our abilities and credentials, so that Speedy-Jamie-the-Webman could get creating. Selecting pictures and writing words was quite fun, as can be seen below.

Gardener Sandi says: "What a lot I got."

Gardener Dave, fondling the produce!

With Jamie and Lis's Bali trip imminent, there was no time to waste.

Lis and Jamie

By now our B and E had arrived back from the States and we were enjoying some great friend-time with them.
For the next few days we engaged mainly in some excellent astrological consulting with Bernie, checking to see whether the stars and planets would provide clarity for us on several issues about which we had to make decisions.

Astro-Bern

In between we did a bit of gardening, helping Bernie put in some berry bushes and harvesting some fresh vittals!

Bernie working up an appetite!

Estrelita hard at work

Berry-nice gardening

Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living!

Sandi and Bernie foraging for food

A Livingston Lovely lurking in B and E's garden

At night we had wonderful chats around the kitchen table, gorging on the delicious suppers Sandi cooked:
the old stand-by, Roman lamb, seafood chowder, Nye veg and ribbetjies bake, honey-glazed chicken wings etc. These feasts were declared so good that B and E declared they did not want to let us leave! What a way to make friends feel good!!

Bernie and the breakfast bib

Rude boy! Why do boys always play with their food?

Before leaving we visited Queen’s Ferry for brunch with Bernie.
Queen's Ferry is a cute village on the river Forth situated between two impressive bridges.

Queen's Ferry quaint high street

The road bridge over the River Forth

The River Forth rail bridge

At brunch we tried haggis for the first time! It is like a spicy, nutty mincemeat [made from sheep’s heart, lungs and liver with oatmeal and suet, all cooked up in a sheep’s stomach] - sounds a bit vile, but is actually rather delicious.

The much-maligned HAGGIS!

Wandering down the street we came across a little bookshop overflowing with used books.
The caretaker said to take as many books as possible, and to leave a small donation only if we felt like it.
What a dream! We staggered out there, laden with masses of reading material for the months ahead.
Who needs to pay a quid+ per book at the charity shops?!

The Bookshop-beamers

We finally tore ourselves away from our South African pals on the Sunday, but not before being treated to a splendid traditional Scottish breakfast prepared by Estrelita - haggis and all, nog al!

Our first stop en route to Newcastle-on Tyne, for a few more days with our Bracchi pals, was the now famous Rosslyn Chapel, not far from Edinburgh.

In the past 2 years since Dan Brown included the chapel in his book [The Da Vinci Code] the number of tourists visiting has multiplied ten-fold.
The whole chapel has been covered with a “roof” for the past 10 years, while they work on restoration and drying it out.

Rosslyn Chapel with preservation works in situ

Rosslyn Chapel as it could be without the scaffolding!

Inside, it is small and as there were lots of people, it was not easy to move about freely.
The carvings and details are quite exquisite, inside and outside, and well worth the visit.

Rosslyn Chapel details of stonework

Rosslyn Chapel - part of the exquisitely carved interior

The Apprentice Pillar is so-named, according to an 18th century legend involving the jealousy of the master mason in charge of the stonework in the chapel, and the skill of his young apprentice. The apprentice carved this beautiful column in his master's absence, and on seeing it the master was so enraged with envy that he whacked him on the head with a masonry mallet and killed him. As punishment for his crime, the master mason's face was carved into the opposite corner to forever gaze upon his apprentice's pillar.

Apprentice Pillar inside Chapel

The drive from Wincanton to Newcastle-on-Tyne was in driving rain the whole way. With many large trucks on the roads, we soon discovered how hazardous it could be overtaking them! The curtain of spray thrown up by their many wheels reduced visibility to zero for a few seconds while on the wrong side of the road!

It was great to spend some time with dear friends, Sue and Kev and their fine lads, Michael and Matthew who were both busy with final exams.

We had fun browsing through charity shops in the city centre, stocked up for the basic kitchen equipment van at Ikea, visited a car boot sale, and a Sunday market on the Newcastle quayside. We had quite a giggle en route to Ikea in Newcastle. To get to the store we keyed the name into Molly, our GPS, and set off in faith that she knew the way. We were soon heading south, which got Dave a bit worried. We checked Molly's destination again and found that she was leading us to Ikea, Holland! Motto of the story: never trust your GPS completely.

Sue is very proud of the magnificent poppies she grows in her front garden!

We spent an afternoon visiting Hadrian's Wall, a colossal feat of engineering, extending 80 miles across North England.

It was built in 122AD by 3 legions of Hadrian's soldiers, in 6 years, to keep the Barbarians out of Roman England. There were 30 forts and a mini fort every mile along the wall, with a great ditch to the north. We visited one of the best preserved forts called Housesteads. It was amazing to see the intricate layout of the facilities, including elevated, ventilated flooring. Standing in the ruins you can see the wall running over the beautiful rural hills to the horizons on either side.





After a week in Newcastle we drove to Livingston [1/2 hour the other side of Edinburgh] to spend a few cozy days with our friends Bernie and Estrelita. Livingston is a very spread out town with wide roads, appearing to have more trees than houses. We spent the next day meandering up and down the old part of Edinburgh City. looking at some touristy things.




This board related the interesting tale of the origin of Jeckyll and Hyde

At the one end of High street is Edinburgh Castle, high on its rock; down the other end is the Palace of Holyroodhouse, which is the Queen's official residence.
St Giles Church in the city centre is a beautiful church with a very ornate ceiling,



but the tiny Thistle Chapel tucked away in the corner is spectacular. Although built only 100 years ago, it is bedecked in the most ornate wood carving in the style of the 15thC. There is a seat for each of the 16 Knights of the Thistle, with a different creature carved onto each of the armrests, and a throne for the Queen when she visits to induct a new knight.

On the Sunday Estrelita drove us up into the Highlands, promising us an excellent cream tea at a place she knew on Loch Tay. After a long, but beautiful drive, we arrived at the isolated Ardeonaig Hotel, in the rain.



To our surprise, the staff were all South African [the hotel is owned by a SA man], and we could place our orders in Afrikaans! We had pots of tea and warm scones with clotted cream, but at a very fancy price: £7 pp! Not only did it bruise my pocket, but I nearly knocked myself out on a low beam as well!

On the way back we stopped to admire banks of bluebells

and a very fine specimen of a hairy Highland cow [pronounced koo]. He was but one of many of these gorgeous, ginger-coloured beasts, with long floppy fringes over their eyes, spotted in the lush fields along the way.


The next day saw us start on the long drive back to London, stopping overnight with Sue and Kev, en route to picking up the campervan. Marty, its previous owner, was nearly 2 hours late, as he could not get away from work, so by the time we had got through a whistle-stop lowdown on how the van works, we hit the peak rush hour of London traffic. It was no fun for each of us now driving unfamiliar vehicles, surrounded by impatient drivers. Again we were glad to put London behind us, as we headed down towards Wincanton in the rapidly fading light.

After a overnight stopover with Ebu and Jeremy in Holton [near Wincanton] we drove the van down to cousin Judy and Rob's where we left it for the 5 days that we spent in Bulgaria.

On our return from Bulgaria we spent the week making new curtains [luvvvverly brown flecked with orange, very 60s, to go with our even more stunning rose-pink velour seating/upholstery], cleaning, sorting and packing the van. 7 of the 9 curtains work perfectly, but unfortunately "someone" was too economical with measurements, so the ones over the back doors cover only half the windows!

Bit of a privacy issue there, considering there's no ablution cubicle on board - so we have to buy more material and redo!