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From Caravan to AirBnB: A Scottish Adventure
This is Dave standing by our home on wheels. Its has everything we need for five week away. When we were students we used to pack a fishing tent, a blow up mattress and sleeping bags and then head for Italy or Greece. Now we pack the caravan and head north to the land of my fathers. This year our travels will take us along NC500 and over to Orkney. We’ve even bought T-shirts with runic writing on them. Don’t judge us, okay. 🙂
Our biggest problem when being away from home is the garden. Luckily, we have a wonderful neighbour who waters the plants and feeds the birds for us. The day will come when we won’t be able to travel this way due to age and so we’re making the most of it. When that day dawns we’ll sell the van and stay in AirBNBs instead. Which leads me to our next photo . . .
It’s a wee bit mad but . . . we’ll leave our van for a week in a site near Oban and cross over to Mull to stay in this AirBnB. It was the inspiration behind the Airstream featured in my Dark Sky Trilogy – Beag air Bheag – little by little. The hero in my novels is suffering from PTSD as a result injured when serving in Afghanistan. He’s retired to his parents Highland estate to recover and there he meets my heroine, Halley Dunbar, an astrophysicist. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to actually stay somewhere I’d only seen in photos on the web. This year, we’re staying there for a whole week. People ask us if we’re bothered by the midges, the answer is no. In the garden there ia a midge exterminator which emits carbon dioxide which, in turn, attracts the midges and then exterminates them. We cover ourselves in Avon’s Skin So Soft. Works for the SAS and us (!)
I don’t want to make this a long post as I’m experimenting with using Jetpack on my MacBook to post. I gave up blogging because I was fed up using WordPress on my desktop and nothing seeming to work. It remains to be seen if I stick with this method. So far, so good. I’m not doing anything fancy, just writing it like a newsletter.
Well, I didn’t think that would work !! But it did. This is an image I made using the free “Grok” app and it shows the heroine and hero from my Dark Sky trilogy. Tor is an Afghan war veteran and Halley is an astrophysicist. They meet when Halley returns to Scotland to organise her great-uncle’s funeral and bumps in to Tor, quite literally, on a moonlit beach and knocks him out cold. They are perfect for each other but they don’t know that in the beginning but – as we find out – their love really was written in the stars.
I’ll finish this blog post by sharing my six Scottish romances. I hope you will take a chance on me and download one of them, here – viewAuthor.at/LizzieLamb
The Ultimate Itinerary for a Scottish Road Trip
Our five week research trip to Scotland
Part One – Leicester – Strathclyde
In the past, when we travelled to Scotland with the caravan, we left Leicester at 4 AM to pass through the M6 Toll Road and take advantage of the preferential rate negotiated by the Caravan and Motorhome Club. Sadly, those days have gone, and it now costs sixteen pounds to travel on the toll road. The toll is now fully automated, so with a quick flick of the debit card, we were on to our first stop – Tebay Services, Westmorland. We were eager to hit the road because Storm Floris was waiting for us over the border.
We love stopping at Tebay services (if only for farmshop, cafe and restaurant). It’s rather strange when you first arrive, because the caravan site is almost deserted. However, as evening approaches, it quickly fills up. It reminded us of the time we travelled to Greece (with only a fishing tent to sleep in!) when campers belted through the former Yugoslavia (avoiding Albania) to reach Greece as quickly as possible. In those days there were queues at the bakery and bread and other supplies quickly ran out. It gave us a taste of what life would be like under a communist regime and it wasn’t very appealing. So, next morning, fuelled by a Cumberland sausage cob (!) and a cappoucino we set off to go head-to-head with Storm Floris.
We crossed the border without incident and, as usual, my heart was full as I remembered everything my family (mum, dad, granny, uncle, four kids and an alsatian) left behind when my father moved south in search of work in the sixties. But I didn’t have time to dwell on it because as soon as we were on the M74, Storm Floris made her presence known. Here, the land flattens out and the wind whips across from the west even on a good day. Soon the caravan was being buffeted by gale force winds and Dave slipped into four wheel drive as spray rose from the road making driving difficult.
At this point in the journey I usually recite Young Lochinvar (one of my fav poems) coming “out of the west”, but the driving conditions were so scary I held my wheesht. I’m sure Dave was grateful for that. In fact, the weather was so apalling, that the CAMH warden at Hamilton rang us to ask if we were still intent on camping there. We were told to come straight in and not to wait until 1pm, as was usual. I was grateful to arrive in one piece and told Dave (not for the first time) that he was a hero, even though his cape was packed in an overhead locker along with the spare towels.
The weather eventually calmed down and the caravan was no longer in any danger of aquaplaning across the motorway. We left the ‘bra’ [which protects the large front window from damage] in place as we were moving on the next day and wanted a quick getaway.
The next day, August the 5th, would have been my mother’s 97th birthday and we decided to make a pilgrimage to Craigneuk via Motherwell to visit the house where I was born. Last time we visited, an elderly lady came out and asked if she could help. She brought me up to date on some of the families I’d grown up with. Sadly, she didn’t appear this time, so we took as many photos as we could and returned to the van.
It was quite emotional standing before my old home and remembering growing up in that cul-de-sac. Back in the fifties, children played without adult supervision and pavements were marked with chalk drawings and peever beds. Although the road was now empty I could recall the children who lived there: Wallaces, Smileys, Bunces, Parkes and my many cousins. Along with the other girls I would sit on the back doorstep and write little tales and poems to read back to each other.
Then, one Christmas I was given a Petite typewriter and my writing career began . . .
It seems strange to think that the Ravenscraig Steel works was – quite literally – in our back garden. We never paid it much heed, concentrating instead on renacting the movies we saw in Saturday cinema in each other’s back gardens: The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Rob Roy and my particular favourite The Ghost Goes West. The works were demolished in 1996 and a new town – Ravenscraig, built there instead. On the last evening we visited it, but there were no ghosts waiting for me, nor a sense of what had been.
One of the eponymous Ravenscraig boilers, me as a “wean”and with grannie. Looking down Meadowhead Road and remembering . . .
I hope you’ve enjoyed the first instalment in our five week trip around Scotland; we covered two thousand miles researching #3 in the Dark Skies Trilogy. I daren’t look at the petrol receipts bcause towing a twenty-five foot caravan guzzles up the gas.
Next time, we travel onwards through the Trossachs to Barcaldine near Oban where we stayed in a romantic campsite situated in a Victorian walled garden.
In the meantime, do check out the first two books in the series and my other novels which are FREE to download on kindle unlimited. You can also read them on your kindle or purchase a paperback. Signed copies of the paperbacks are also available; please leave a message in the “comments” and I’ll get back to you.
….and remember – if you’ve enjoyed this post please like/share/reblog and leave a comment
Winter Star in the Scottish Highlands – 99p – #kindledeal
Winter Star in the Scottish Highlands is available to download for £0.99 until 31st of May.
After that it reverts to the original price of £2.99. So get it while it’s hot. Winter Star in the Scottish Highlands can be read as a stand alone. Or, you can find out more about Halley and Tor’s relationship and how/when they fell in love by reading Dark Highland Skies . I am currently writing the third book in the series: Summer Solstice in the Highlands of Scotland which I hope to publish late spring 2026.
This isn’t the first time kindle deal I’ve been offered. I was on holiday in Scotland on a freezing cold autumn day at John O Groat’s when my phone pinged and there it was. That deal was for my novel Boot Camp Bride. If you want to know more about Boot Camp Bride you can read an extract here. It is currently available to download for £0.99. Strangely, I was in the Cotswolds on the hottest day of the year this time when Amazon offered me this kindle deal. I accepted straight away as such offers are as rare as hens’ teeth.
Perhaps caravanning brings me luck! Back in 2017 when I was offered my first deal, we were touring Scotland with our first caravan – and Ebay bargain at £300. Since then, after deciding that caravanning is for us, we have upgraded several times and are currently on our fifth – a double axle with ensuite shower room, island bed and full size fridge. Strangely enough, we collected it from Newhaven which is exactly where we spent our honeymoon in great uncle Tommy’s wooden (!) caravan with no running water, fridge or other refinements.
You can read here about how our caravan becomes my writing room when we’re on holiday
Anyway, I digress. Here the books are side by side. I have a lot of affection for the hero/heroine in Boot Camp Bride, Rafa and Charlie – but Tor and Halley (Winter Star) are my and readers’ current favourites.
If you haven’t read ‘Winter Star’, Here’s the blurb – As the harsh Lochaber winter approaches and with Halley expecting a baby, living in the converted Airstream caravan, Beag air Bheag, becomes impractical. Tor’s family home – Eagles Crag – offers shelter, but his mother’s inevitable meddling is holding them back from moving there. Instead, they find refuge in the Dower House and prepare for the arrival of their baby with optimism and hope, embracing the magic of a Highland Christmas, culminating in the Ghillies’ Ball on Hogmanay.
However, an old flame of Tor’s rents the nearby bothy threatening to disrupt their idyllic life . . .
Is their love strong enough to survive the trials of family, winter and a ghost from the past?
. . . and finally. When we were in the Cotwolds we went to Snow’s Hill Manor where I spotted a bassinet in an attic room. It was seeing a similar cot in Drum Castle in Scotland two years ago which inspired me to include the contentious “Strachan Bassinet” in Winter Star.
I’ll sign off for now. Thank you for reading my blog post – I hope it has inspired you to download Winter Star and Dark Highland Skies which are available for £2.98
PS – I would love it if you ticked the FOLLOW box on my Amazon page and susbcribed to my blog
Lizzie Lamb - author 