Friday was a raining all day sort of day and we had felt secretly relieved to be not welcoming Mike and Rose til the following day as the ferry was cancelled due to technical issues. They had found alternative accommodation and we were planning a quiet indoors day, some dvd watching and an early night all round to get ready for them arriving the following morning. A flurry of Rum emails went round updating everyone with boat info and it turned out the Orion was bringing foot passengers and the Spanish John was bringing freight after all. I checked the time and Mike & Rose would have had less than an hour to get to Mallaig and get on board so I decided not to try and get hold of them but then had a text from Mike to say they were in Mallaig and would be on the boat!
Which meant a period of frantic tidying and a dash to the pier to collect them! I took them to the camping cabin where they were staying and then brought them up here to the croft. We tried to introduce their cocker spaniel Breeze, to Bonnie but Bonnie was not at all hospitable so we elected to keep them apart for the remainder of their visit. I suspect it could have worked but it felt too risky to bother trying for the sake of a few hours so we either kept Bonnie outside while Breeze was here, or shut her in Scarlett’s room which is where she tends to hang out of an evening anyway.
We had pizza for dinner and a really nice evening with them before they headed off down the hill to their cabin. Because they were keen to be ‘home’ before dark it was earlyish nights to say goodbye for their whole trip which was quite nice as it meant we got to watch an episode of Lost before bed each evening.
Saturday – Ady went off to work while I did some crochet – I’ve caught up with myself a bit and made four midges the last few days so we have a decent cluster of them back in the shop again = I think we decided the collective name for a group of midges is a ‘Bastard’ 😉 Bob the pig kept getting out so we did some pig fence adjusting to deal with that and I re=pitched the blue wigwam tent which was wet and needed to dry out before being packed away.
Ady cooked a really nice curry for dinner, Mike and Rose came up around 5ish having spent the day off exploring.
Sunday – We re-pitched the bell tent and assessed the damage from the storm last weekend. It’s fixable but probably not really suitable for the air bnb renting out. We are researching some other tenting options for that for next year. It was a fishing competition from the pier so we called for Mike and Rose and headed down there. Quite a few folk came along and it was great fun. We caught a fair few including Davies’ first catch and Mike fulfilled one of his bucket list tick offs in catching, killing, cooking and eating fish. We brought back a couple of mackerel, a trout and a pollock for starters as Ady had already got a joint of our pork in the oven cooking slowly. Mike cooked the fish and we ate like kings! It was a later night than I think they had planned but really enjoyable.
Monday – we had arranged to meet M&R to give them a castle tour. I called in to the shop to pick up some more lures as we had decided to do some more fishing later. I held on to Breeze while Ady took Mike, Rose, Davies and Scarlett around the castle. Fortunately Bad Neil was around with baby Dougal so he and I walked and talked while Ady was doing the tour, catching up with Ross and Ian too.
Ady and the kids drove along while I walked with Mike and Rose to the pier to wave them off on the boat, then when the boat had gone the four of us took our rods and did an hour or so fishing off the pier. We did really well, a shoal of mackerel came in and Davies and I were pulling out a catch with every cast. We got 15 worth keeping and had a real production line going of me and Davies fishing, Scarlett taking them off the hooks and Ady processing them (killing and gutting them). Scarlett also had her first catch.
Ady and I collected animal feed and a load of slabs of tinned food from the shop, brought it part way back in one car, transferred it to the other one and brought it home. We managed to forget the meat we had taken out of the freezer and so had to walk back  to the first car to collect that. We realised afterwards we had also forgotten the cider and orange juice but didn’t bother going back again…
Today – Ady emptied the animal feed from the car and collected the forgotten cider and juice, I did a fix up on the bell tent, we listened to Popmaster and then we spent the day fixing up the fence around the veg beds. We are 3/4 of the way there with just one side left to put up tomorrow and a gate to construct. It looks fab and will make such a difference. I made steak pies for dinner inbewteen and then Ady and I sat on the sporran for over an hour listening to music, chatting and having a beer. It was lovely 🙂
Scarlett has spent most of the day beside the river, Davies has made the most of having unlimited power as we’ve had both solar and wind today so has been doing online-y stuff.