After a quick argument about my engineering prowess, we set off for Scotland.
Glorious weather and a LOT of motorway driving spurred us to get there as soon as we could to enjoy it. As always, we had forgotten to pack something, this time it was plates, so we stopped at go outdoors enroute to get some new ones. And we were off again, getting as far as the motorway roundabout before stopping once more. This time to sort out my window washers. There was so many dead bugs smeared across the windscreen it was essentially frosted, like trying to peek into nextdoors bathroom window. Once the hose was unpinched from the bonnet we actually started to cover some miles.
We have 2 days to get up into Scotland and wander around before we need to be at our first booked stopover, a static caravan near Oban. Today we were headed for Galloway Forrest Park and a car park that is part of a Scottish tourism scheme to trial allowing campervan to stay the night. At the moment it’s free, but soon to be £5, which I’d happily pay. Sometimes its a little bit of a pain to find places to Wild VanTM so this is a great idea. We operate on a “leave no trace” basis anyway so we really just want somewhere relatively level to park up for the night (maybe with a view and a toilet if at all possible).
We stayed here, at Clatteringshaws
This place was excellent! When we turned up, we could see about 7 other campervans taking advantage of the scheme. It looked busy and pretty full, but just as we turned in, 4 cars pulled out and left the prime Loch-side view parking open for us! It was perfect and gave us an uninterrupted view from our bed, right out onto the water. We went for a little walk to see some of the coastline but quickly came back and set out our camping chairs, bagging the best spot.
As the sun went down I spent some time playing around with the camera, getting (what I hope to be) good sunset and silhouette photos. After that, we enjoyed the Dark Sky Park in its glory. This is an initiative to reduce light pollution and maintain a wide area of dwrkness to facilitate stargazing. I’m very glad we got reclining camping chairs now because it meant we could very comfortably lay back and look directly up at the stars while chomping on toblerone. The moon dipped out of sight early so there really was good gazing to be had.
It really was a glorious evening and the perfect place to park up – even if next vans dag didn’t get along with us. Kayto just huffed and turned his back dismissively.