Travelling Trappies

Salutations de Saint- É million. I may have found my spiritual home! Maybe Trap & I were both French in another life????  We’re having a fab-u-lous time here. The weather is good, food, alcohol and fuel is cheaper and the camping grounds are nicely laid out and have pools – a necessity in these temps! Most of them have bars/restaurants and you can often put a fresh bread/croissant order in for the next morning!  I like it. Also my French is much better than my Spanish (6 years of high school French is coming back to me) making it easier to communicate and read signs/instructions etc. Trap, not so much!!!   Last time I wrote, we were in Paris and heading into town for my b’day celebration at Paradis Latin. What a great show – I can’t show you any pics or videos as they weren’t allowed, but we could take some of the dinner entertainment, so you can get a bit of a taster. My three-course meal of two types of pate followed by chicken and some kind of tarty/moussey/spongy ...

Bonjour mes amis, bienvenue en France. Well, what a difference! It was 27 when we arrived, sunny, no rain and a little wind!!! 🌞 However, before we get to that there’s a few other places to fill you in about. After visiting Llandudno in Wales, which we really liked, we spent a couple of days in Conwy – REALLY cute – we highly recommend visiting this corner of Wales if you get a chance. After Conwy we headed to Caernarfon Castle - one of four heritage listed castles from Edward I’s reign, which took 47 years and £25,000 to build. Pretty impressive and again, a very cute town despite the gale force winds! One thing about Wales is the multilingual road signs they have – which can be a bit of a problem as the Welsh comes first and is often a lot longer than the English, so not reading Welsh we kept missing what the signs said – especially when there was more than one place on them!! A woman in Caernarfon gave us some good advice – read from the bottom up!! Huh – seems simple enough – Not!...

Helô and croeso i Gymru (Hello & welcome to Wales). Yes we are in Wales – not what you (or in fact we) were expecting a week ago. We were heading south from Loch Lomond and after 10 days of unrelenting rain, wind and cold, and with this weather forecast to continue in Ireland for the next few weeks, we thought bugger this, lets head south to warmer climes and come back later in the year, so see you in September, Emerald Isle. We were able to swap our ferry tickets to Sept at no cost and lets face it, the weather couldn’t be any worse in September than it is now!!!   So after having a lovely lunch in Barrhead with the Bennett fam, we headed down to Ayr the birthplace of Robert Burns. If you didn’t already know this, then you would’ve found out as soon as you entered the town as the main attractions all focus around Robbie  - Brig o’ Doon (a bridge that was the setting for the final verse of his poem Tam o’ Shanter), which is across a narrow lane from the Robbie Burns Statue...

We did a slight detour  at the start of the route to Loch Ness - to try and spot   Nessie - no luck   😞! Before heading North East out past Inverness.... What an amazing trip around the top of Scotland. We have survived the NC500 – just!  Did manage to dislocate both our grey water and fresh water pipes meaning we lost all our fresh water on one leg (bummer) and all our grey water on another (yay – saved us from having to empty it at the campground!). Luckily both of them were easy fixes – they are designed to come apart rather than break, so we just fitted them back together, refilled and off we went on the next leg. The roads are single lanes for a large part of the route with passing places (about the size of a car) placed on both sides at various intervals. So, if you see a car coming then you stop at the next passing spot and wait, or they wave you through. When you don’t see them till it’s too late, one of you has to back up to the closest space! Not entirely ...

Sin sibh a h-uile duine (Hi everyone), failte gu Alba (welcome to Scotland). Lang may yer lum reek (wishing someone a long & healthy life apparently!) Well it’s been an interesting first week or so in Scotland. It’s been very windy, bitterly cold, sunny, warm and everything in between!!!   Unfortunately Trap & I caught a cold in Edinburgh so we ended up hunkering down in Aberdeen for 3 nights – taking lots of drugs (meds) and resting – I still have a bit of a cough but we’re definitely improving. As many of you know, Edinburgh is a gorgeous city full of history & culture. Our holiday park was about 35 mins outside the CBD but there was a bus at the end of the driveway that took us straight there, so was very easy. We managed to get a new 3-month prescription for Trap from a prescribing pharmacist, although we now know how much the the meds cost when they’re not subsidised!!!! After a visit to the castle and medication searching on day one, we hopped on the hop on/...