You might have noticed that it has been a wee bit quiet around here for the past few days, that’s because we were up in the Scottish Highlands, travelling around but based in Fort William, which isn’t actually as bad as I remembered. although like just about everywhere it has quite a few empty shops, it’s certainly larger than when we were last there. Unfortunately the weather at Fort William was hellish, it rained most of the time but on our last day we drove to Glenfinnan and it was gorgeous, we had never been there before and it is absolutely stunning. In fact all of the scenery in the Highlands is gobsmackingly gorgeous, it makes England’s Lake District look ordinary. Spean Bridge, where the monument to the commandos is situated is so amazing it almost looks unreal.

We stopped off at Glencoe first, on the way up, it was raining there too, but on the way back we saw it at its best. The reason we went up north was because we were given railway tickets for The Jacobite steam railway, which is the train which features in the Harry Potter films, but they don’t make much of that fact. I think they really could earn quite a bit of money if they sold Harry Potter themed ‘stuff’ but they don’t seem to want to cash in on it. You can see images of the train and some of the journey here.

The train runs between Fort William and Mallaig, it’s an 86 mile trip and the scenery is wonderful. There’s still quite a lot of snow on them thar mountains, it’s still freezing up there and it won’t melt before the next snowfall.

At Glenfinnan we went up the monument, it was seriously windy up there though so after we had taken some photos we made the scarey trip back down the very steep and narrow spiral stone staircase. My thighs haven’t recovered yet, and to think that I had been hoping to have time to go up Ben Nevis whilst we were there. It’s an easy walk I’m told but it certainly doesn’t look it.

I haven’t got around to sorting through the photos yet, but hope to do that soon. We had a great time and the drive back home was almost the best part as it was such a lovely evening.

Sadly when we got home we went into the kitchen and Jack said, there’s a funny smell I looked over to him and it was then that I saw the huge damp patches on the kitchen ceiling! We raced upstairs asking each other – what’s above the kitchen? We’ve only been in this house for 10 weeks and still find the layout quite confusing. Of course it’s the main/family bathroom which is above the kitchen, but everything looked normal, until I peeled back the cushionfloor vinyl and discovered that the floor was saturated with water, the cistern had obviously leaked whilst we were away, and that was the first time we had gone away since we moved here. We couldn’t
/can’t believe it, such unfortunate timing, not that there’s ever a good time to have a domestic emergency, but at least if we had been there we could have turned off the water immediately.

Bear in mind that we bought a house which is only 4 years old because we hoped to avoid expensive maintenance problems in the future. We had problems with our Victorian house at exactly this time last year – and I really thought it was going to be a deja vu scenario costing us bucketloads of dosh to put right. So I was just about pulling out my hair, but then one of my brother’s friends rode into the rescue – one of those very handy chaps who can turn his hand to all things DIY and is really good at it, and he reckons that it isn’t a big problem, in fact he will sort it out tomorrow and it’s just a matter of waiting for the plasterboard ceiling to dry out completely before painting it.

So it’s just as well that I didn’t chuck out my paintbrushes and rollers, I thought about it when we were packing everything to move as I had no intentions of doing any DIY in this new house. But heigh-ho we live to fight another day – and yes we did fight because I had said to Jack that I thought there might be a wee leak in that loo and like all men he knew better and said it was only condensation!

Anyway, back to The Jacobite, the only bad thing about being on a steam train is that you can’t actually see the train, but I had a look at the You Tube video below and although it doesn’t give any idea of the scenery really, as it concentrates on the train, it’s still an interesting watch. The Jacobite even says ‘I think I can, I think I can’.