Way back in 1976 I went for a nice bike ride with my then girlfriend starting at Wick going up to John O’Groats and then right along the North and West coasts of Scotland down to Glasgow (details of the trip can be found at www.bikeride.cankita.co.uk). Whilst cycling down the West Coast we would often glance over to the horizon in the west where some mysterious islands could be seen when the weather was fine. I knew they were The Outer Hebrides and I vowed one day that we would go there.
That ‘one day’ took almost thirty years to come about when, after many holidays in England, Scotland, Tenerife and Florida, I decided that the time had come to explore those mysterious islands. In April 2005 we hired a car, packed a couple of tents and Sandy, myself and our son, Sean, set off for a trip that would take us from the Butt of Lewis to Vatersay. After taking the ferry from Uig Bay to Tarbert we made our way to Stornoway and then on up to The Butt of Lewis where we camped for the first night. It’s a bit windy up there! We made our way down through Westside over to Uig and then down through Harris enjoying mostly good weather and then crossed to Berneray where we spent a great night beside the beach. The following day the storm came in and we saw nothing of North Uist and had to retreat to the Outdoor Centre at Lochmaddy where we had the place to ourselves for a couple of nights. We spent two days looking out of the window at the squalls across the nearby loch and ventured out only for food at the Lochmaddy Hotel - nearly losing the car door to the wind at one point! There was no way we could have camped.
After a couple of days the storm had lessened and we ventured onwards. We saw virtually nothing of North Uist and Benbecula but by the time we had reached South Uist the sun was shining again although the wind was still strong. We camped for a night near the beach at Howmore only to have the tent blow down in the middle of the night forcing us to retreat to the car for an uncomfortable night. On then down through South Uist and over to Barra and Vatersay in much better weather. We spent a couple of nights on a spit of land on Vatersay which overlooked Castlebay and watched the ferries and the Hebridean Princess come and go. On our final day we caught the ferry from Castlebay to Oban.
We had a couple of days that were truly awful, the tent had blown down and it was never easy to sleep with the wind constantly taering at the canvas but we had loved every single minute. What a superb place! We just had to come back.
It didn’t take long. Two months later, in June, Sandy and I hired a smaller car and booked a self-catering cottage in Cnip on Lewis - we had learned our lesson with the tent! Weatherwise it was a pretty poor week with every day bar one grey and drizzly and Mrs MacLennan, our host, would pop in each night and apologise for the weather. But we loved every single minute!
Back to the humdrum of every day life and Christmas 2005 came round. We did what we had done for the past ten years or so, had the family round and I cooked elaborate dinners for the whole ten days we were off. There was nothing wrong with it but something was stirring inside me. I realised that we might be doing the same thing for the rest of our lives. On New Years Day 2006 I suddenly made the decision that we would move to The Outer Hebrides. I told Sandy and she said ‘Great’. There was no need to talk any more about it but we had to plan it out. We still had a large mortgage on the house from having to re-mortgage about 10 years ago when the bank said ‘We want our money back’. There was no please about it, they would have taken the house in the blink of an eye. So we had to get the mortgage down as fast as we could as well as saving what we could to give us a start in our new life.We worked out that mid 2010 was the earliest we could make it and so the date was set. We would put the house on the market in early 2010, stick all the furniture on Ebay and then pack up our jobs at the end of July 2010. We would be in Lewis by my birthday on the 9th August.
From then on every day became simply a day to get done with and a day closer to our dream. We’ve had a few good times since 2006 but mostly every effort has been put towards reducing the mortgage and keeping the dream alive. The date is still firm although the current climate has made things much harder. Not only has the house gone down in value but Sandy works for Wedgwood (heard the news?) and interest rates mean that savings produce very little return. It’s going to be a lot tougher than we planned but whatever happens we will try our utmost to make the date and, whilst we will have far less money than we had hoped, we would rather be poor in the Outer Hebrides than well off where we are now.
So, you see, the counter is our lifeline, our spur to a better future. It’s now been 3 years and 13 days since we made the decision to move to The Hebrides and we hope to be there in 1 year 6 months and 23 days. Each day it seems like an eternity until it happens but when I look at the counter I can see that there is now much more behind us than there is to go.
