One word? When seven would do…

Oops!

Thursday morning we said goodbye to Lynda and Stuart. It was so lovely sharing the cottage with them. It was also a bit lovely to have it all to ourselves after they’d gone for 48 hours too! 🙂

Once they had gone we totally took over the cottage doing all the backed up washing including getting all our sleeping bags, blankets and pillowcases washed and dried, airing pillows and camping mats and making the most of the space to really give Willow a good clean out and get everything sorted out.

Then we sat down with popcorn and Despicable Me which I only half watched but the others all said was excellent.

We debated dinners for the last two nights and came up with steak and chips (Scarlett wanted fish cakes, she’s been desperate for them for ages and is not as keen on steak anyway. Honestly, she’s so cheap – I made fishcakes as a real budget emergency dinner in the van using instant mash and tinned tuna and she loves them!) and fajitas and tacos as dinners we all liked with various tweaking for individuals, were not easy to cook in the van and would be nice to have as a treat.

We walked along to the CoOp and got some of the ingredients for tacos but due to a lack of avocado and a sense of humour failure on my part when the other three were being gormless about alternatives we then went to the Farm Foods shop in the other direction and had steak instead.

In theory the kids had an early night. In practise I suspect it was still about midnight before they were asleep.

Friday we’d planned to give Willow a little run anyway so we headed to Morrisons for the rest of the food supplies, stocked up on engine oil and anti freeze for Willow and checked out prices of petrol at the three nearby garages ready for the morning. We’d all slept in so had a late breakfast / early lunch before we went out and then came home and spent the remainder of the day finishing laundry processing and laying out all the things we’d need to pack for the last WWOOF host then packing them up ready to stash in the van. We started to pack up and gather stuff together and the kids and I watched Despicable Me again, this time I watched properly and I really enjoyed it too. Usually Disney Pixar have the monopoly on putting out the best of those types of films but I think Universal have done well with that one. We did some blogging on WW, summing up the wild camping experience and talking about our last host and what happens next. I’m so proud of the kids for how adventurous they are about this whole thing and how clearly they see the positives of this year. I know some of their friends are very envious and would love to be living in a van like them but I know plenty more are less enthusiastic and think it would be awful. They are looking forward to staying with my parents, not least because they reckon it will be like Christmas come early when they have access to all their toys again :).

I had a bath and then cooked dinner, enjoying swanning about the large kitchen, wine glass in hand, being all Nigella and making things sizzle and saute 🙂 while the others had baths. We ate infront of the TV as a last night treat and watched Autumnwatch before starting to watch the Derren Browne show on plus one. We’d only been talking about Derren earlier that week to the kids and were really pleased to notice one of his shows was on and assumed starting at 9pm it would probably be ok for them to watch with us. About 10 minutes in it became rather obvious it was not remotely suitable for them with way more adult content than I was prepared to unravel and explain, or feel they need access to just yet (and I am always falling on the wrong side of not censoring enough so for me to make that decison it was pretty full on!) so they went off to bed and Ady and I carried on watching. It was a real shame as I think the general message of the show was one that would have been good to explore with the kids but actually I thought it was one of the weaker programmes he has done, usually I am a real fan.

Ady and I eventually headed to bed around midnight but both of us slept really badly, lying awake at 4am chatting. It felt like our last night in our house before we left for WWOOFing with loads of last minute things to do before heading towards the unknown. I eventually fell asleep again about 530am and have felt really knackered all day today.

Saturday up with the alarm to ensure we got everything sorted out – van packed up, cottage hoovered and final tidied up, kids all packed etc to be out for 10am. It’s tough packing into Willow as you can’t do that shoving stuff in to be sorted out later trick you do into a car at the end of a holiday as you’ll just be tripping over it and giving yourself more work to do in a smaller area so you need to do it properly and that takes ages.

We left on time though, handing the keys over bang on 10am before filling up with petrol and heading towards Mallaig which is just over 40 miles from Fort William. We’d half thought we might find a stop over point for tonight on the way and indeed did drive past some beautiful parking places in the mountain ranges next to lochs but Ady had suddenly got all paranoid about just where we’d be leaving Willow while we’re on Eigg so I thought we’d be better just getting here and finding our space for the whole two weeks now.

Sure enough we found the carpark near the ferry port and have a good space we can sleep in for the next two nights and leave her here while we’re gone.

We had lunch and chatted for a bit and Ady and I talked about the fact I was feeling a bit flat. We decided it’s just that I’ve run out of momentum with nothing within my control to be organising or planning really. For the last 18 months I’ve been making this adventure happen, up until fairly recently we were still not clear about what happens next. Now we have made decisions it is suddenly out of our hands as it all now hinges on our house selling. We could well be living in our own home again somewhere up here by this time next year, planning our first Christmas and getting to grips with our new life. Or we could be facing a nightmare of our house not selling and having been without a home for nearly 2 years. Glastonbury will be a great short term location but we are very much banking on it being a couple of months stop gap while the house sells.

I felt much better for having talked it through with Ady and all settled in myself again now. I don’t like wobbling, even just briefly so was pleased to be back on an even keel again after a couple of days of minor internal angst. We did some dreaming and plotting and coming up with exciting business ideas which always makes me feel better – an adventuring pioneer rather than a nomadic drifter ;).

We had a brief walk around Mallaig, it’s fairly small and lots of it is closed for the season or not open at weekends – a heritage centre and visitor centre were both closed. The station was open and we happened to be there when the steam train pulled in which was pretty. We walked around the ferry port and went to the ‘most westerly outdoors shop on mainland UK’ where we invested in a cargo bag to tote all our clothes across to Eigg. We’d been debating what to use and how to do it and this fits all clothing in for the two weeks leaving us a rucksack each to carry our own stuff – toys and books for kids, kindle and laptop for me along with chargers for phone, camera etc and toiletries stuff and tablet, solar chargers and various other stuff for Ady. Feel better about that now as we were thinking carrier bags might not be the best option but was all we really had in the van. I’ve emailed the host to check we don’t need things like towels and bedding but am still not entirely sure where we’re sleeping. I think it might be in a caravan.

Back at the van we played cards, I helped Davies with some more writing on his story he’s writing and illustrating (it’s based on Little Howard’s Big Question TV show which he’s been watching loads of on YouTube), his drawing of characters is really excellent, he gives them so much facial expression and personality in just a few pen strokes. I really do think he has a great talent for illustration and a real style of his own.

Ady cooked – we had a real mish mash of foods including leftovers from the cottage and some of the food supply we’ve been carrying in the van. After dinner we read some story and in theory we’re all tucked up early although both kids are still actually awake and only Ady is asleep so far.