Day 5 - Making our way to the isle of Arran

How we got there

Last evening, paying for our second night stay at The KenBridge Hotel campsite, the manager asked about our ride – we chatted for a while and we ended up talking about our route and where we were gonna go next. My initial rough plan was to go all the way up north to Ulapool through coastal roads and take a ferry from there to the Hebrides. And then make our way down to Skye, Mull or Jura before reaching the mainland again. The manager advised us to revise our route and to go to the beautiful Isle of Arran first from Ardrossan; approx. 60 miles from New Galloway.  From Arran, we could then make our way up to Skye along West Scotland’s coastal route.  This way we were avoiding the motorway going through Glasgow and Edinburgh.

It was 11pm by then, I thanked him profusely and left him to finish cashing in. I excitedly got back to the van and told Jamie. I also told him that maybe our initial plan of going to the Hebrides, Skye and Mull as well as discovering the West coast of Scotland was maybe a little bit too much to do before mid-August when we’d start heading to Norway. Cramming in too many things, we would probably not have time to discover any of the islands and places properly as we’d have to go back on the road again.

In the morning

Our ferry in the Ardrossan harbour for the Isle of Arran

Whilst Jamie was getting the van ready to leave, I cycled to the Cat Strand cafe in New Galloway to make use of its internet and finally check emails, banking stuff, check and log our expenses and book ferry. Jamie joined me later on and got details of a couple of nice campsites we could call. One had wifi – we both agreed that it’d be useful for us to have it especially since we wanted to launch our blog soon. This is how simply we chose to stay at the Lochranza campsite and golf course named after its village on the north coast of the Isle of Arran. It was more than what we’d expected to pay, but the manager, Nigel welcomed us and showed us around all the facilities – reception and lounge area displaying a mineful of information  about what to do on the island, laundry room, toilets & showers. We paid for three nights initially in case we may go wild camping.