We're back...and we're off!

Today we are leaving home, going on what for us is an adventure. The ferry to Holland was booked over two years ago when COVID 19 was just entering our vocabulary and when travel restrictions were only a figment of imagination but the kind ferry company allowed us to change the booking, twice in  fact, so it now comes at no extra cost. Many things have changed for us in those two years, not least of which is the vehicle in which we are travelling, but the spirit and the motivation is still there, as strong as ever.

But of course this does not confront the elephant in the room, does it. The previous entry to this blog is dated 28th March 2015, a full seven years ago. I can see the face of Angus the alpaca right now as I sit in front of my keyboard but although I might speculate on where he is now, the elephant who sits beside him will not be moving; we will not be moving him aside to write about what lies beneath his bottom. These ramblings have always been about the present and this is how they will continue. That is not to say, of course, that hints regarding the missing years will not emerge at some point.

There are some new characters in our lives who will be introduced as and when they appear. Ducky now spends her days roaming between Faversham in Kent and the Jura, a mountainous region in France, driven by our longtime friend, Richard and his partner Karen.

So let me start by introducing Martin who, you may notice, has a companion of the waterborne sort. She is called Eun na Mara.

This trip, however, is with Martin alone and the three of us will soon be loading ourselves onto a ferry for a sea passage to Holland to meet up again with our Dutch friends, absent from our lives for far too many years.

Leaving our home in Scotland so far behind us seems a strange thing to do but we are packed and prepared, suitably attired in warm clothes (it is still winter, technically) as we drive off in a blast of sunshine which persists all day, and the next, and the next. The season has suddenly shifted into spring and as we move south the cherry blossom appears along with black crows (in western Scotland they are bigger and have grey bodies, 'hoodies' we call them). It is an alien world we have driven into, and this is even before we have left what we now must refer to as the United Kingdom, 'UK' being the initials we must soon display on Martin's rear end.

For our final night on British soil we are alone in a field, the uncut grass almost up to Martin's bottom. It is quiet, how we like it. There's a pond, with ducks, a small farm shop at which we buy a large sweet potato, and an oak tree still bare of anything approaching a leaf. We had to take covid tests en route and achieved this only by setting off at first light from Penrith and only tomorrow, when we are told the results, will we know whether this particular adventure can start. If either of us tests positive then another adventure will begin. It is a strange uncertain world we now live in.