One word? When seven would do…

Have a feeling I may have used that blog post title before – anyone name the song the lyric is from?

Today was a day off – Carina was at work and Ed was visiting Islay with someone to discuss community gardening projects. Here in Tarbert they have established a ‘health garden’ in the grounds of the doctors surgery where they grow medicinal herbs with information boards describing what things are, what they can be used to treat and how to take them. It’s very lovely and we’re supposed to be doing a days work in the health garden with the one paid staff member on the project sometime next week which we’re looking forward to.

Ady got up and tidied Willow, the kids stayed in their room playing DS and chatting and slept in 🙂 Lovely to not have the alarm set. I stuck a wash on and hung it out, we all had late breakfast / early lunch and dug the fishing rods out of the van. Ady and the kids all had fishing rods for Christmas and my friend Helen (who lived on a boat, but is currently living in a house again as she has just had a baby boy!) bought me a rod as a goodbye and good luck present when we left so we have one each. Ady and the kids headed off as I was still pegging out washing so I wandered along about ten minutes after them.

I found them sitting over a heap of rocks on a tiny bay made of shells – it’s where fishermen all threw their scallop shells for years and it hs built up a little beach cove of them. There is also sea glass and other tiny shells, it’s incredibly pretty 🙂

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The others were all trying to work out how to set up their rods with the help of an excellent book Michelle sent to Davies 🙂 thankyou it has been *most* useful today 🙂. I was nominated best at the knots so I got on with that bit while Ady who has done a bit of fishing in his younger days showed the kids how to cast. Davies was pretty good at it actually, certainly on a par with me (not necessarily a very high bar!) but Scarlett was less keen and more cagey. She also confessed that she is not as comfortable with the catching and killing which I have lots of respect for and would never want her to lose.

Once all were set up we spent some time practising casting and reeling in, with varying degrees of succcess and tanglement!

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It really wasn’t very deep water there though so we decided to head back to the pier (which is simply a small area projected out into the sea, not a pier like I’d think of but I guess fitting the definition) and joined various other people fishing there. Over the couple of hours we spent there only about 3 fish -mackrel – were caught and they were deemed too small and chucked back in so we didn’t feel too bad at our lack of success. Davies really enjoyed it and is itching to go and try again and I thought it was good fun too. Scarlett really enjoyed just hanging out at the beach and was giving a great Attenborough style commentary of other wildlife including jellyfish, starfish, various sea birds and most excitingly a seal 🙂 We failed to get a picture as he just bobbed his head out of the water a few times in various places and as soon as you’d realised it was him again he bobbed back down but he hung around for a while. Apparently there has been a seal visiting that spot for years who sometimes nicks fish off people’s lines and just leaves them with the head!

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Back at the host the kids went off to play with Peter who was home from school. They are really enjoying his company and Davies was telling me he’s been asking them lots of questions about Home Ed. We talked about whether they might like to try school if we ended up settled somewhere more remote like this where schools are smaller and more a part of the community. All hypothetical at this stage and I’d want to look closely into how Scottish education works but something they may want to consider if we did end up in a smaller community or village.

We got an email from our next host cancelling. This felt meant to be as we;d been discussing cancelling ourselves but I decided not to as I always feel as though we have missed a potential opportunity when we do the cancelling (we’ve cancelled two – one when we were stuck at Bryn Mawr with Willow not working and one when it was back down in South Wales and we were heading north to Durham, both times I felt sad about it). This means we only have one more booked host now – the one on Eigg and as I contacted them yesterday to suggest we would be flexible about changing dates if needed and they emailed back to say they wanted to stick to our planned November 1st date that means we have nothing between leaving here on 12th September and arriving with them other than our week in Rosemarkie.

Our plan therefore is to list all the places we’d like to spend some time, sights we want to see and work out a rough route with some overnights at campsites or even daytime stops to fill up with water / have showers / empty the loo and waste water etc. (I know C&CC have some sites that offer that for a few quid), check petrol station locations and work out a daily budget for travel and food. I think as we’re already in the north east at Rosemarkie we’ll probably head further north and then head back down south along the west coast to Mallaig for the ferry to Eigg. Obviously very bad weather could scupper plans a little but it all seems doable and exciting :).

Ed and Carina have offered some tips and ideas of places to head for which we’ll spend some time noting down with them and also told us that they are heading off for a weekend away on Mull next Friday so we’ll be left in the house alone on Saturday. It will be funny to have come into their house before them when we first arrived and leave after them when we go :). It does mean we can have leisurely baths, do a final wash and have the kitchen to ourselves on our last day too which will be nice 🙂