I enjoyed a lie in this morning and Ady came and presented me with the WWOOF book when he woke me up. The WWOOF book is something we have encountered at around half of our hosts and is simply a guest book. Sometimes we have struggled not to fill the whole book with gushing, at others we have struggled to find something nice to say. Here I struck the balance between raving about the gorgeous scenery and the warmth and kindness without mentioning the fact we’ve been hungry a lot and the work load has not really been very WWOOFy!
Ady and the kids walked down to the village for a few bits and I ended up totally distracted by reading what previous WWOOFers had written.
Ed was out all day today at a Gaelic choir festival, Davies and Scarlett were playing with Peter, Ady was busy with various things so I spent a lot of time up in our bedroom which was actually very nice and peaceful. We all reconvened for lunch and then a walk was planned. Carina had said we would need leggings and Scarlett*hates* wearing waterproofs and wellies so I put to her the choice to wear them and go or not wear them and stay behind. I expected her to grudgingly wear them but having just been told off for something else she was stroppy and said she just wouldn’t go then. I elected to stay with her so the others all headed off and we had a long chat about cutting off noses to spite faces, sacrifice and compromise. All very amicable and reasonable but still tough to talk through. We decided to head off after them so did don waterproofs but we were probably 15 minutes behind them by then so didn’t catch them up. We tracked them for a while by footprints but kept getting distracted by the view and then decided to not climb any higher incase we were heading the wrong way.
All week Davies has been after a packet of tissues with bank notes printed on them in the gift shop so Scarlett and I had been planning to nip into the town to get them for his birthday so we popped back to the house to take waterproofs and wellies off (I hate wearing them as much as she does) and walked to the town. We got the tissues, Scarlett had her now customary dive under the shelves in the CoOp and netted £3.67. We had started to look like really dodgy people in there acting all furtive each day so I explained what she was doing to the staff who were giving her odd looks speadeagled out on the floor peering under the fixtures. Another shopper was most excited and she got down too to see if she could reach £1 that Scarlett couldn’t. She has had nearly £8 off the floor in there this week :). She blew her £3 on a packet of tissues for Davies and a tartan sheep fridge magnet he has been eyeing up in the tourist office so is pleased to have bought his birthday presents herself :).
We came back and snuggled up together on our bed, Scarlett DSing and me playing Air Traffic Control which I am slightly addicted to on Ady’s tablet, while waiting for the others to get home.
Ady and I had a walk out to the castle when we saw the flag get blown off the pole in the wind. We sat on the bench looking over the harbour and chatting and a young girl came along looking all upset. We budged over and she shared the bench with us and told us all about her boyfriend getting all shitty with her so she’d walked out of the flat, she was 29 and worried that if it didn’t work out with him she didn’t know if she’d find anyone else. We got a potted life story of her and her boyfriend and were ascertaining if she had somewhere else to go when suddenly the boyfriend arrived looking for her. He seemed pretty reasonable and calm so after a brief chat we left them to it and watched from a safe distance to ensure they were okay. All looked well and they sat cuddled up talking for a while before heading off together, so fingers crossed they sort themselves out. It was odd because we’d been saying that really we’d been biding time here today having originally planned to head to Rosemarkie but not doing so because of the cost so stayed here an extra night. Maybe chatting to her and giving some advice was why we were here today. Funny how you may effect the path of someone’s life by an odd chance meeting.
Back at the house Ady and I had showers, Ed arrived home and we all sat down to a later than normal dinner by candlelight. There was much toasting of great WWOOFer and WWOOF hosts, we had dessert and then all crammed into the kitchen to play a rowdy game of Cranium together before all heading outside to see if we could spot the Northern Lights and do some star gazing (zero light pollution round here).
Everyone headed to bed and I intend enjoying my last night in an actual bed for many weeks to come.