A light hearted story about a mis-adventure, and a near miss (split it into two parts as it is quite long). Part 2 is a wee one.
 Hope you enjoy it

 Inside, I think I am a ‘highlander’ reincarnated. I loathe the indoors and relic in the out. I have long, thick, almost black hair, blue eyes, skin as pale as snow that never tans and freckles in all the wrong places (i’ve looked it up, it’s a flaw in the Celtic gene pool that causes this).

I also intrinsically know how to do things like build fires and make a shelter out of nothing but a twig and some toilet paper. This being so, my idea of a nightmare is being cooped up in stifling heat for a two week holiday, having nothing to do but laze about, drink lukewarm cocktails and be ignored as bronzed blonde beauties glide about like something from Baywatch, playing volleyball, or whatever they do.

Also if nothing else, I hate to follow a crowd. So when it came to our first summer of complete freedom (graduated form high school, had turned eighteen) I was determined to celebrate in a way unlike everyone, who had all shot off to Faliraki or Ibiza to drink themselves to death and forgo all daylight hours.

My best friend Katie and I had decided that upon passing our driving tests and her buying her first car, we would take a ‘road trip’ around Scotland (we even made a poster and stuck it to the back of the car. Don’t laugh). It was going to be three weeks of real roughing it with nothing but a tent, baked beans and the midges for company. There was a flaw in the plan however, and it all started on a trip to Sainsbury’s the day of our departure.

We were supposed to leave at 9am sharp. Katie, as usual, was 20 minutes late. We headed to the shops to stock up on supplies. Two hours later we filled the car to the brim with baked beans, pasta, tins of tuna, bananas, bread and rice. Our staple diet for the next twenty four days (I think there was also a bottle of vodka and croissants in there but we figured at some point we’d deserve a treat).

We squished the food in alongside our backpacks, portable hob and grill, lanterns, first aid kit, tennis rackets, wellie boots, mac in a sacks, blankets, hot water bottles, kettle, sleeping bags, camp beds, fold away chairs and of course the tent.
The back of the car dropped a foot.

I swear the exhaust was almost on the ground. From then on in, we couldn’t accelerate past 50 miles an hour without going backwards. Admittedly this wasn’t ideal should we need to make a swift exit from anywhere. However unperturbed we headed off, four hours late, for our first stop; Ben Lommand.

We lived in Glasgow and it only took two hours to get there (which included getting lost once and getting the car jammed between a land rover and a motorcycle in the car park where we got lost) but it was good we had the extra time because putting a tent up in twilight with only a lantern and the moon for light, in a soggy marsh, isn’t as easy as doing it in your back garden. That first night we ate, didn’t wash our plates (sorry mums) and crashed. Quite literally. Katie’s camp bed fell apart after she spent an hour getting it up. She was not a happy camper.

I woke up the next morning with eight, yes EIGHT midgey bites arranged artlessly around my body; bloody blighters. The heat was blistering and we had packed for a typically wet Scottish summer, woolly hats and all. Never mind. That day we went to plant a tree to help with the conservation of the Scottish forests. We hiked up to a place called ‘Adders pit’ (isn’t that a lovely name for a conservation site?) and planted the tiny oaks. Up there, I finally understood the meaning of the word ‘breathtaking’.

The only place that beat it was Glen Coe. We had headed there next as my favourite english teacher had sadly passed away while she was up there just a few months ago, and I wanted to pay my respects. I had stood on the look out point and fell into a meditative trance. I actually struggle to put into words the majestic sight that met my eyes; it was something out of a fairytale. The smell of pine was exhilarating. Every essence of me screamed that I wanted to go into that jungle and discover it’s mysteries, but before I had any more time to dream about what those may be, Katie startled me.

It was getting dark and we had to go. I dropped some pennies into the wishing well, and sent love and peace into the abyss.

That evening we stayed in a hostel, sharing a room with four Spanish ladies (who evidently don’t care about being completely naked in front of absolute strangers) and a family of moths, who persisted in attaching themselves to my pyjamas. The warden had to come in and tell me to be quiet at one point I was screaming so loud. I had wanted to be a vet and had spent the last two years castrating lambs, cleaning up cat sick, putting my hand up cow’s bottoms and shooing rats away from my horses stable. Why I kept flying into full blown frenzies, still puzzles me.
 
The next day we went into the local town and bought novelty tea towels to take back home and went to a basement pub for lunch which was less a pub and more an establishment for all the, how should I put this, ‘interesting’ people in the area to congregate. Strange they might have been, but they gave us directions to another one of Scotland’s best kept secrets; Glen Etive.

Here Katie and I swam in the loch while admiring the waterfalls. It was ethereal. It felt like the most isolated place on earth, and I adored it. They also suggested a hostel we stay at in Skye, and I made a mental note to find it once we got there. 

Before that however, we visited Mallaig. The best days of the trip, and the ones before we hit the reason am telling this story. It was a seaside village so quaint you felt as though you were in a television programme from the fifties. Here people actually relished in eating fish and chips by the docks, and licking home made ice cream off of home made ice cream cones. The fishermen greeted you as if you were a local and the local art shop displayed proudly the stunning oil paintings of times gone by. We stayed in a privately owned hostel above an actual tea shop.

Here we also had our first hot shower in two weeks.

Staying in our room were a young American couple who were about to get married, a guy (Mike) from New Jersey who had come here to swim with dolphins (he was promptly sent to the local tourist information centre) and who for some reason kept insisting we all play scrabble (Katie and I got out of it by claiming we wanted to film the harbour at night time, which we did, and ended up feeding ruined fish to wild seals on a fisherman’s boat and witnessing the coastguards respond to an emergency call). I can’t quite re-call the other people but suffice to say they were lovely, and the night we spent there was like a slumber party for grown ups.

Midge bite count by this point; 15 bites. I itched like hell.

The following day I had no sense of foreboding. We were taking the ferry across to Skye. After which we planned to make our journey back home via the east coast. We had already been to Ben Lommand, Callender, Crieff, Loch Ness (no we did not see Nessie, but plenty Bill Connelly look-a-likes) and Mallaig. After Skye it was Rassay, Aviemore, Edinburgh then home.

The journey across was delightfully stress free. While we were waiting in the queue to board the car had broken; like actually broken. No radio, no lights, no anything. A swift trip to a local garage (which took a minute and a half, Mallaig is in the middle of nowhere and everything’s fairly compact), fixed the problem. It was a blown fuse. You’d think two intelligent girls could have worked that out wouldn’t you? Never mind a bit of flirting and the mechanic gave us a new one for free.

Don’t judge me I had to!

By this point we had no money left. We had scrimped and saved the £200 for the holiday as it was and spent about half of that at sea world the previous day. Mallaig is intoxicating; it makes you do crazy things.

Driving off the ramp Skye seemed such a beautiful place. A world of evergreen. An hour later, I had changed my mind. The landscape was volcanic. Everything was grey and dark. The sheep had gone. The dodgy road signs warning drivers about sheep (but kids had turned into elephants, rock on) had gone and they wasn’t a civilisation in sight. We eventually found our hostel which was literally in the middle of nowhere. An 'Anderson shelter'/garage style shed stood on a sloping hillside. Pulling up the drive, things only got worse…………………………………………