We found her, or she found us, using the old “both of us on the phone, waving our arms in the air and asking if you see me yet..” method. Yvonne was our bonnie young lass that we had spoken to on the phone before and she was a sight for sore eyes. We had been trying to find her for over 1/2 hour. She was about 30 years old, tall with long black hair, bright red lipstick, long black coat and clunky red high heels. She quickly led us to the side of Whitey The Great, our new home for the next two weeks. The van was parked in a spot that I never would have found on my own, so I was quite happy that she went the extra mile in tracking us down. Yvonne went through the instructions for how to operate the motorhome, while she uneasily eyed the police car parked behind her. “I’m double parked” she said as she made sure no one was sitting in the police car. I asked her how all of this worked, did another driver follow her and take her back to work in Edinburgh? (A plan was slowly forming in my mind)…I looked at the size of Whitey, the small busy streets, and the stick shift placed in the wrong spot, the steering wheel on the wrong side.
It turned out that Yvonne was going to take a bus back to
her home in Glasgow in the suburbs, or the West End as she called it proudly.
We ended up talking her into driving us to a gas station near her home and
from there it was to be a straight shot to Loch Lomond. That alone, probably
saved our lives. I was getting a little bit less nervous, as I pushed the fear of driving on the left in a foreign country a little more into the future.
Whitey was a Fiat high top van, made into a motorhome. 18.5
feet long or thereabouts, and quite handsome, although the tires looked a bit
scruffy for something 1 year old and with only 7000 miles on it. Whitey was
something I would be proud to drive and I even wondered out loud why something
like this wasn’t available in the USA. It had everything you would expect in a nice big American motorhome, just on a smaller scale. It even had a flatscreen TV and a shower!
Yvonne kept us entertained while she drove, telling us about her accent,
which is one of the things that makes life interesting on trips like this. She
was from Ireland, then lived in Australia, New Zealand and then Scotland. Her
true passion wasn’t renting campervans, but Geology, and she took jobs in
places where she could pursue her true love: hunting rocks, which made her a kindred spirit with Pam. She told us all
about the volcanic past of Scotland, and that knowledge came in handy during
the trip. More than a few times on the journey, we saw mountains that looked like the volcanoes we had seen in Hawaii.
We finally arrived at the BP gas station, and I held out hope
that Yvonne would be our travel guide for the whole trip, and I’d never have to
get behind the wheel and find out if I could really do this. Then she was gone
with a ‘ta ta’ and a mention that she was going to her boyfriend’s pub for a
pint or two…”hey wait a minute, it’s not even lunchtime!” I exclaimed. I later
learned that the beer is so good there, it was decided that you can drink
any time of day.
I got behind the wheel, fastened my seatbelt and turned to
Pam. “Shouldn’t we go inside and see if we need some snacks for the road?” Pam
agreed and we spent the next 20 minutes in the convenience store, looking for
good eats for the road, and it was one of the few times in life that I wasn’t
chomping at the bit to get going…in fact, as I looked out at the van parked out at the gas pumps, I asked Pam if she was really sure we didn't need to do some more shopping before we took off...
No comments:
Post a Comment