Tuesday 6 May 2025: We’re back!

Did anyone notice we were gone?

We had a lovely 2½ weeks doing the NC500 in our campervan. The NC500 is the North Scotland coastal route and it’s about 520 miles long, max. Depending on where you go. And only then if you don’t deviate from the route. Two weeks doesn’t do it justice. At all. And we’ve already decided to go back and do it again in blocks, so that this time we can actually visit some of the places of interest.

It took us 3 days to get there. We took it easy and stayed at Barnard Castle, Glasgow and Perth on the way up. Then we had 2 nights in Inverness, 2 nights in Brora, 2 nights in Wick, 1 night in Melvich, 1 night in Clachtoll, and 1 night in Ullapool, before taking a quick detour to Kyle of Lochalsh so we could nip over to Skye. 

From Kyle of Lochalsh, we got back on the NC500 and went to Beauly, where we spent another 2 nights. Beauly was the end of the NC500 trip, and from there we headed back south, via Perth, Gretna and the Lake District.

For some reason, I stopped journalling at Beauly. I think we were probably both exhausted. I was proud of my back because I honestly thought it would give up at the 7-day mark, and so, it turned out, did the poet. We did, however, decide to head home a day early so we could have more time at home recovering and getting ready for work.

I haven’t decided in what order to publish the journal yet. It’s definitely going on the Alphabet Adventurers website, that much I do know. But I don’t know whether to get it published first and then serialise it online, which would certainly keep the Amazon bots happy, who hate it if you publish your own work where you want before sending it to them, or the other way around. 

The poet has hours and hours and hours of videography to go through. He did a lot of the editing while we were on the road, and he stitched a few of them together. But there’s still a lot to do on that. Plus, there are the photography stills to weave in. These aren’t just the pictures I’ve been sharing online, by the way. These are a combination of those, plus a ton of others on a different device. 

He painted 2 pictures while we were away, and started another, while I wrote a short story and a complete novelette as well as the travelogue. The short story was for 12 Stories in 12 Months. The novelette was for the great novella challenge. I had an assignment to do too, for this week’s WMG Publishing Gothic Writing Workshop, and I wrote the outline and even started it. But it was due in on Sunday evening, and we were still travelling. I’ll still attend the workshop, but the story will be used for something else now.

The weather was very kind to us. In 18 days we had 1½ days of inclement weather. It banged it down for all of that time, though, and the wind was blowing a right hooley. For the rest of the time it was either glorious sunshine or just dry and cloudy with sunny intervals. Only our first night was a bit chilly too. From then on, the nights warmed up.

I think I did very well with the pre-scheduled blog posts. I spent the best part of a day planning them all and only missed 2 in all that time. One was one day last week, another was actually today’s. 

I’d like to say we’ve had a nice rest, but it was actually very busy, very time consuming, and very tiring. So we really are back at work now for a rest. Once I’ve decided where it’s going to be published, I’ll provide links. In the meantime, I hope our ‘then & now’ amuses you as much as it amused us!

I have a lot of catching up to do, but hopefully, back to normal tomorrow!