Wednesday 16 June

In my last post I said I'd written a blog post that I'd subsequently lost. It turns out that, rather than saving it as a Word document or as a draft on Blogger, I'd emailed it to myself. I've already recapped what happened on the two days in question, but, now that I've found it, here's the original post, written on Wednesday 16 June at the campsite in Blair Atholl:

According to the Energy Saving Trust, the average person in the UK uses 142 litres of water per day. That’s 2000 litres a week for two people.

We left home last Wednesday with 40 litres of water in Bertie’s tank, 20-litres in our drinking water bottles, plus 2.5 litres of hot water in our collection of flasks. That felt like enough as we felt sure we would stay at a campsite within a few days. Our certainty was misguided (not for the first time on this very point).

By Monday morning we were down to our last dregs of drinking water and we were glad we hadn’t frittered away any of the water in Bertie’s tank with such frivolous things as showers.

With no tap in the public toilets in Newton Stewart, I bought a ‘just in case’ 6 litres of drinking water, which would see us through to Tuesday, by when we would surely have found a tap. We then went to the motorhome service point at Clatteringshaws Loch which proved not to have a tap, but I did find one outside the (closed) public toilets at the Visitor Centre. The big question 24 hours later was why, having taken the walk to find that tap, I completely failed to return to fill a container from it (distracted by coffee and hot cross buns, then our parking ticket had run out and I still hadn’t decided where we were headed).  

Whilst at Clatteringshaws we had looked at nearby campsites, but none was convenient for where we wanted to be and, as you know, we spent Monday night at a pull-in off the A713. By yesterday morning we were down to our last couple of litres of drinking water and Bertie's tank was reporting itself as empty (which, with the gauge being in 25% increments, means there's somewhere between 0 and 30 litres), so I opened the inspection hatch on Bertie’s tank to see how much was really left. Enough – and it would do for hot drinks – so we didn’t need to carry 5-litre containers to find a nice looking stream.

Yesterday’s hot drinks were coffee and mint tea. This morning I reverted to my usual slice of lemon in hot water, whereupon I discovered that the water from Bertie’s tank tastes disgusting. Having been boiled, it was unlikely to do us any harm, but, well, yuck! I had to put a tea bag in my mug to mask the taste.

We knew the water situation was going to be resolved today, but I can’t claim that the reason we’ve come to this campsite just for the water (once we’d left D&G and started heading up the A9 we knew of a good watering point), but because after 7 days of exercise without more than a flannel wash, the allure of a mains water hot shower was too much. Yep, we’ve spent £25 on a campsite effectively just for a hot shower each and to get a few litres of water (and to park Bertie on a pitch so sloping that even with his levelling ramps we’re still less level than we were in either of the last two night’s laybys without ramps). Clearly, there are other benefits to being here, although after 4 or 5 stays here, it’s still not clawed its way from the category of ‘least favourite campsite’.

We booked and paid for our pitch yesterday, and were told we could arrive after 1pm today. With stops in Perth for fuel and groceries, we only mistimed ourselves slightly, and pulled up the drive at 1256. A cheeky pre-check-in visit to the service point killed time until the clock ticked over.

We have now availed ourselves quite thoroughly of the facilities (although, annoyingly, for the first cup of tea I made upon arrival I boiled the stove-top kettle on a gas ring, having failed to think about the fact that we had electric), and in a moment I shall apprise Mick of the plan for tomorrow.