The first time we went to Orkney we took the caravan as far as Brora, three children (two with chickenpox) and three days and arrived in the drizzle of a July afternoon.
Later, overnight seemed best – spouse working all day then driving the first stage, me awake to keep him awake, then driving the midnight stint: youngest piteously from the dark of the back seat “I’m all on my own,” his elder siblings asleep either side of him.
Once we stopped in a Northumberland layby: three males got out to pee and I imagined the nearby bus shelter rising with the tidal surge and floating away in the dark.
Just the two of us went to view Scapa Haven, overnight again, needing sleep half-hourly, and the September solstice crossing of the Pentland Firth the roughest we had ever known; when we took a trailer load of furniture up the following Easter I skidded on the icy road and we ended in a ditch.
On my last return from this seventeen year sea view haven, alone and having painted for three weeks there, I hit a post office van who drew out un-looking, smashing the headlight so I had to hurry four hundred miles home before dark.
Next Thursday we begin another three day journey there, ‘doing it while we can’ on a fifty-two year old A10, returning via a cousin in Invergarry and the Applecross peninsula.
was it the second time that we took the caravan to Dunnet Bay then?
ReplyDeleteWe took the caravan to Dunnet Bay the year before going to Orkney - I remember watching the blue & white boat going back & forth to Scrabster ...
ReplyDelete