I bought my first car, a Y-reg Renault Meganne, for £500 when I turned 20. Like most people who get their first car, I immediately wanted to have a roadtrip. I sent messages out to my friends and tried to organise a big trip somewhere, but people had other commitments, or someone couldn’t make those dates and someone else couldn’t make the alternative ones, and probably no one else was quite as psyched as I was to dive into my very old, potentially unreliable car and head off into the unknown.
At first I was put off and it looked like I would have to abandon the plan and the closest thing to adventure that the Burgundy Beast (the very ironic name my old car picked up years later) would experience would be the local McDonalds drive through. But then I did something quite out of character for the old me, and decided to just go it alone.
It wasn’t that I never did anything on my own, I was an only child and was perfectly comfortable spending time in my own company, but I never saw myself as being super confident growing up, and the idea of having someone there to bounce ideas off was very comforting. But such was my frustration at the possibility of missing out on christening my first car with a big trip that I bit the bullet and decided to do it anyway.
I’ll try not to bore you with too many details of what was essentially just a long drive to John O’Groats and back, and instead tell you about a few key things that happened along the way, and that made the trip so memorable.
The first was that everything went wrong, from the very start, virtually the entire trip was a complete suffer-fest. I had no sat-nav and promptly got myself lost so that my first day was not the 3 hour drive to freedom I’d expected, but instead a 5 hour slog of growing anxiety and increasing levels of dread. It was probably about 4 hours into this journey of despair that I realised I had forgotten to pack any of the maps I would need for the areas I wanted to visit, and when I arrived at Galloway Forest Park it was to discover that the Forestry Commission had recently felled the trees in the area I had in mind as a park up for the night, transforming it from idyllic woodland scene into a jumble of broken branches, mud and caterpillar track marks. I set my gas cooker up in the boot and cooked pasta and a tomato sauce whilst being simultaneously rained on and attacked by the voracious Scottish midges, before just climbing into the back of the car to sleep. Day one completed, and I’d started as I would go on.
Now this trip was a long time ago and the details are very hazy in my mind, so I’m not sure how many days I stumbled around in the Galloway area getting lost in the seemingly constant rain whilst rapidly realising that I was not as used to being on my own as I’d first thought. Let’s say it was two or three days later when I headed up to Loch Lomond. I’d found out that one of my cousins was there with a group of friends having a reunion. She invited me to join them and so I arrived late in the day and dug my tent out of the car (I hadn’t bothered putting it up yet as I’d just been sleeping in the car, demotivated by the weather and the prospect of packing/unpacking a wet tent) and wandered down to the water with them to set up camp.
One of the group had spotted my ukulele in the back of the car, the idea had been to take advantage of the alone time and improve my playing, and insisted that I bring it down to the loch for the evening. This genuinely terrified me. I can play guitar and the uke, and I think I’m alright at it, but I had never NEVER played in front of anyone. But later that evening, after a couple of bottles of beer, by a campfire with what was basically a group of complete strangers, I strummed a few chords, everyone sang along, and we all laughed and enjoyed the night together. It might not sound like much, and no one sat round that fire will have realised it, but that was a huge deal for me.
The following day, after clearing away all traces of campfire, tents and general merriment of the night before, the goodbyes were said. Except I wasn’t saying goodbye to all of them. The previous night had been intended as their final evening together, but over the coals of the fire I’d persuaded a few of them to head further north with me and tackle the mighty Ben Nevis. And so we set off in two vehicles to what I had thought was a campsite at the bottom of the mountain, but it in fact turned out was several miles away from it. I meant it when I said that almost everything went wrong on that trip!
Undeterred by my lack of campsite knowledge the rest of our group, now five in total, headed up “the Ben” the following day. It was a long hard slog up the tourist path, in the constant wind and rain, and in hindsight we were that group that I now turn my nose up at for attempting to climb a mountain in inadequate clothing and footwear. But we crept our way up the hill and took a swig from a bottle of rum one of the girls had carried up in her bag, then we shuffled back down rather wet and cold.
The rest of the trip I spent on my own, increasingly wanting a shower, and some company, and getting rather sick of sleeping in the back of my messy car to escape the pouring rain.
I arrived in the very north of Scotland in the evening, although in June the evenings stretched on for hours. I wanted to get a ferry to the Orkney islands but hadn’t researched the prices and now saw that it’d be far too expensive; I’d already become very anxious with how quickly I was completing the cycle of fuelling up, watching the needle drop, and fuelling up again.
I headed to where my map indicated there was a Youth hostel, but I couldn’t find it. The thought of the Youth hostel, with its real beds, and hot showers, had been a light at the end of many days of rain and lonely driving, but after searching the entire town I just couldn’t find it.
I stopped to ask a local man who was cutting his grass, at what I’m pretty sure was about ten at night, who then informed me that my youth hostel had burnt down a few years ago, taking with it my dreams of a good nights sleep and a proper wash. He suggested that I try the local hotel.
I forget the name of the hotel, but what I can recall very clearly was the feeling of despair as I walked in to discover there was no food being served, and no rooms going spare. I was, by this point, quite emotionally drained and at the end of my tether. As has happened since the dawn of humanity and the brewing of alcohol, I poured my heart out to the two barmaids and told them the tale of my woes.
But then something remarkable happened. Some time later one of the bar staff came over to me with the incredible offer that, if I was up and out at the crack of dawn, I could stay in one of their rooms for a very discounted price! I was over the moon!
And so I ended my northward struggle in a swanky hotel room, my kit drying out in the bathroom after the best shower of my life. I sat up in my double bed with my gas camping stove on the bedside table and cooked a boil-in-the-bag curry and rice. It felt incredible.
For me the whole trip is a great memory to look back on, and is not memorable for the successes that I had (of which there were many) but because of the times when things went wrong and I had challenges to overcome. It taught me that it’s important to get out there and bite off more than you can chew, and its important to fail, and to get outside your comfort zone. If I was to do the trip again tomorrow I would do most of it entirely different as I’ve learned a lot since then, and I look back at some of the things that happened and find my actions laughable now. But I’m so proud of the old me for having the guts to get out and do something a bit different, maybe it was one of the small steps that I’ve taken that has lead me to being who I am today.
To end this blog, which has become far longer and more detailed than originally intended, I want to pass on to you that idea of just getting out and doing something that might be a little bit beyond your abilities. Bite off more than you can chew, fail miserably, but don’t ever be miserable that you fail. Failure brings growth and growing is what life is all about.