Snow, games, love by email

I’ve had a flood of emails from Lynda today, all of which made me smile more and more and feel slightly teary. The first was to say the company had been unable to get hold of the owners of Wanderers End so they had booked a different cottage instead. A quick look at it online shows it to be lovely, even lovelier if you have been living in a campervan for six weeks! 😉 I then had an email this evening to say she was worried we may have been bulldozed into sharing a holiday cottage with them and she forgets we aren’t family and therefore happy to just fall in with their plans! I emailed back to say we were totally overwhelmed with their kindness and the only downside for us was feeling bad we were not able to pay anything towards it but would be more than happy to buy all the food and do all the cooking (actually we are really looking forward to doing all the cooking!). And we hope they will let us repay the hospitality when we move up here for good. I am getting very excited at the propsect of a lovely long guest list of people coming to stay 🙂 I got yet another lovely reply to say they would agree to us going halves on food and yes please to doing all the cooking! I do love Lynda 🙂 She could certainly teach my Mum a thing or three… infact I’m rather evilly looking forward to telling my Mum L&S are coming up and paying for a holiday cottage for the week… 😉 actually maybe I’ll let the kids ring and tell her!

This morning we woke in our very cosy layby, it was an excellent overnight spot. It was cold in the van this morning so we all pulled our clothes into our sleeping bags to get them warm before getting dressed. Reminded me of pulling my school uniform into bed and getting dressed under the covers as a kid. It’ll be good for Davies and Scarlett to have tales of frost on the inside of windows and condensation puddling on the windowsills to tell their kids as they put another jumper on rather than turn the heating up 😆
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We listened to Popmaster and watched the weather keep changing from blue skies to rain and hail with the hilltops all around getting shrouded with mist and clouds and emerge with further dustings of snow every time. On the next sunny interval we donned hats, gloves, wellies and coats (even Scarlett and I wore socks!) and ventured out.
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We were parked right next to Cluanie Dam so wandered along to take a look at it close up. It’s huge!
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We didn’t want to drive far today so decided to visit a shop if we saw one but to stop at the next best layby really. We ended up driving less than 10 miles. We found one, just before the viewpoint for Glen Garry. I know it is just before rather than just after because we pulled into it, Scarlett vetoed it on rather spurious grounds and we have been operating a consensus based decision making rule for overnight stops. We then got to the viewpoint stop and decided that actually Scarlett has vetoed rather a lot of places lately on fairly feeble excuses so maybe a majority vote would be better. We discussed it further and agreed the layby would be fine so turned around and went back to it :). Scarlett was fine with this by the way so it was all but consensus in the end, just with some additional brow beating ;).

The views were stunning for about 15 minutes
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Then the rain and wind returned and stayed for the rest of the day.

We drank hot chocolate, had lunch, made cookies, baked a pie for dinner and played lots of games. We did some treetop (as recommended by Em), some mini travel version of Cranium (grumble pail in Yorkshire 50p, first played in Tarbert at host family), some Go Fish (pack of cards, pound shop in Lancaster, game learnt in Glastonbury from Jill), some noughts and crosses and boxes (taught by my Dad when I was kneehigh to a grasshopped and played on trains to London with kids over the years), a game of Beetle (no idea where I learnt it but I taught D&S and the other kids at Bryn Mawr it one sunny afternoon) and then a very long and complicated game made up by Davies using various cards, some toy animals, some toy cars, a torch, a roll of sellotape and what appeared to be ever changing rules which meant Davies won both times we played 😆

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The kids did some more reading together too.

It was a lovely afternoon 🙂

Hurrah for radio 2, easy entertainment and spare pairs of socks.

After dinner we all snuggled up for stories and then into bed. It is very cold tonight although once we’re actually in sleeping bags it is fine but I confess to feeling very pleased at the prospect of the holiday cottage next week and am aware we will need to decide what to do after the hosts as I don’t think four weeks in the van before Christmas camp is viable as the weather continues to turn colder.