So today we woke up in our rather picturesque camping spot and gave the van a good clean out. Living in a small space gets messy very fast, also we promised we would talk photos of the curtains/cushions that out neighbour made for us, so need the van to look half decent for that.
After repacking, we judged that the clouds were high enough to attempt Baelach na Ba or Pass of the Cattle. This road is one of two routes to get to Applecross penisula and climbs around 2053ft in five miles.
A proper test of Ruby’s engine, especially the bodged cooling system. Needless to say, I switched on our extra fans and opened the tailgate for extra airflow! As I was driving/freaking out so I don’t have any photos of this particular moment, you’ll have to wait till we come back through again!
The pass starts with a steady climb, winding up between two mounts and it’s not till the very end that things get interesting. Especially as the van has a very wide turning circle and the last thing i wanted to do was end up doing a 3 point turn to get round a hair pin bend.
She was a tad warm by the top, but she made it!! I had a bit of a proud mum moment about that.
We didn’t stop in the view point, mainly because there wasn’t all the much in the way of a view, but carried on down into the village itself.
We stopped for a celebratory pint at the Applecross Inn (you can just see the village at the back of this picture) before starting off a walk around the village and the hills behind.
The walk takes you out of the village and then up past a small loch, before climbing the hillside. Here you turn onto a track and continue until it brings out on Applecross campsite.
Here we saw the tamest deer I have ever seen, you could probably of touched them but best not with horns like that.
We the turned off the road and climbed higher up the hills on Smiddy’s Walk. At this point, its actually pretty hot and I’m walking along in just a top in the sunshine.
We cross over the road we came in on yesterday, complete with ominous notices.
The route continues across the hills behind the village before dropping down to meet the river and follow that back to the main road.
At this point we’re scouting out potential parking spots and see a nice one in the bay. So we head back and collect the van and drive back down. There’s one other family there in the transporter and plenty of space. Unfortunately by the end of the evening we were joined by two other vans, making this the first night we have shared a campspot with anyone. Fortunately they didn’t block off our view and we actuallly managed to eat dinner outside, just before it started raining.
The Kombi Chronicles 