After being happily car-free for more than two years, we all of a sudden realised that we really wanted to have more freedom to explore Scotland and to see more of its wild and hidden places… in the best of affirmations, less than a month passed between making that decision and finding a perfect little van for ourselves, not for city driving but just for weekend hikes and camping and we are very happy that we made the decision! We’ve already got quite friendly with our “Munro”, heading out of Glasgow almost every weekend since, and it’s already enabled us to visit friends on the west coast, with more visits planned soon… Crucially for me, self-employed and working from home, it’s really creating a break between the end of the working week and beginning of the weekend, something I’m not very good at. So it’s a wonderful thing. And, just so you can see how wonderful, here are few highlights of the first couple of outings in Munro!
As I said, another thing about Munro is that he enables us to visit friends around Scotland and the UK and I was especially keen to visit my friend Debbie and her husband John in Ardnamurchan. Deb has been extraordinarily supportive and generous since we met not long after Scotto and I arrived in Scotland and I really wanted the chance to spend some time with her (although on one of the world’s most beautiful train lines, Ardnamurchan is so beautiful that you want to cruise along the tiny coast roads and really take in the views, either in a car and on foot if you have the time!).
We timed our trip to combine it with a workshop run by Plantlife Scotland on lichens and the Celtic or Atlantic rain forests of the west coast of Scotland and so met Deb and John at the Ariundle Centre in Strontian. We spent the day learning about lichens- the complex, almost magical way that these organisms come about and the intricate relationships that they have with the plants and environment around them- and collecting and dyeing with some of the windfall species found in the rainforest. There are so many different species of lichen in this habitat…
And here are a few moments captured in the dye studio:
It was a wonderful day and a lovely way to share some time with new friends!
Next stop… who knows! But I know it will be somewhere beautiful- pretty much all of Scotland is stunning : )