Gill and I like to travel light, we rarely put luggage in the hold of aircraft even when travelling with Ryan Air however having a holiday in the Caterham is even more challenging as the boot space is very small.
So a day beforehand everything is laid out on the bed and a purge takes place to discard anything unnecessary or that is not easy to wash and re-use.
Once this excercise is complete you load up the car, find a few gaps and fill them with things you previously discarded.
We then set off north, 327 miles in five and a half hours to a Premier Inn outside Glasgow where the kind cook in the Brewers Fayre next door gave Gill a nasty dose of food poisoning.
Welcome to Scotland, not a good start to the holiday.
So today we had a late start whilst Gill's insides turned upside down and then had a leisurly drive up the side of Loch Lomond visiting the Falls of Falloch (pictured opposite) and then to a very interesting site of an ironworks (Bonawe) built in the 1700's. Before Abraham Derby and his chums worked out how to smelt iron using coke everyone used charcoal. So much charcoal that they exhausted the supplies in England and had to look elsewhere. A company based in the Lake District who had run out of wood set up an ironworks near Oban as there was a good supply, they needed 10,000 acres of woodland each year and employed 600 people processing it! The buildings have been preserved and it was an enjoyable and informative way to spend an hour in the sunshine.
We are now in a nice B&B outside Oban and tomorrow set sail for the Outer Hebrides, we do hope the weather is not too rough.