Having been held hostage at Bunree for the last five nights by Basil’s missing radiator cap, I feel I’m going a little stir crazy. I don’t think we have ever stayed on a single campsite so long and although the view from Basil’s front window is breathtakingly beautiful, I think I’ve had enough of it!
Today things have gone from bad to worse. The cap for Basil’s coolant header tank was supposed to be delivered to a garage in Oban today. So when I had heard nothing by 11 am I telephoned and the very nice man who runs the garage said he was still expecting it in today. He would just ring the supplier and double check and ring me back when the part arrived. Thirty seconds later he was back on the phone: the part had not made it onto “the van” from Inverness and there wasn’t another “van” until Monday!!!!! So we are going to have to wait until Monday, but there are no spaces on this very popular campsite and so we will have to find somewhere else for Sunday night. We’ve spotted a nice wildcamping place in the Forestry Commission land inland from here, so that is favourite for the moment.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, last night, when I went to get some ice cubes from our freezer (yes, I know, Basil’s a very posh motorhome) they had started to melt. The fridge and freezer have stopped working. Regular readers may remember this happened to us in Norway and we ended up having to eat a kilogram of defrosted peas! I’m not doing that this time. I posted some questions on my favourite Hymer facebook forum and the most popular out of many solutions was to go for a drive on a bumpy road to mix the coolant chemicals up!
So since I was already getting fed up staring at beautiful views we decided to risk Basil’s radiator and drive the 10 miles to look round Fort William. The Rough Guide is scathing about Fort William’s attractions, or lack of them, and having spent an hour or so there, I think the Rough Guide is fairly accurate.
Well done you urban planners – not
A bit more traditional
Fort William is essentially one long High Street and that’s it. What’s more some brain dead urban planners in the 1960s or 70s have ruined one end with dull concrete monstrosities. The old High Street is fairly traditional, but with the original old shops now occupied by a dozen coffee shops, charity shops and a fair few empty buildings. We wandered up and wandered back again. I sampled a Scotch Pie, and was none too impressed and we had a sandwich each sitting on a bench and then we left. For anyone visiting the Highlands I can’t really recommend Fort William unless you’ve got nothing better to do and we didn’t.
Church of Scotland – Fort William
After all that, when we returned to site, the fridge is still not working, it’s raining and the nearest fridge engineer is in Inverness, more than 70 miles away. So if the fridge doesn’t magically start working, after getting Basil’s part from Oban, hopefully on Monday, we may be heading to Inverness and then we would have visit the far north east before working our way across the north coast and finishing with the Outer Hebrides. Basically everything is now up in the air.
Tomorrow the weather is looking better, Melek’s limp seems to have mended, so I think we might walk to the Corran ferry and explore some of the opposite bank of the Loch on foot.