Our first road trip of 2019. The adventure to start the year! I’d been looking forward to it for weeks. But what is a road trip without something going horrifically wrong? At this point I should remind you of two of my favourite trips gone wrong here and here. Good times.
So, my husband and I worked a lot over Christmas and before that we’d been consumed by our house move and getting the house out of it’s magnolia/laminate floor phase, so we were both absolutely desperate for a little trip away. We never usually get full weekends off either, so we decided to make the most of it and book an Airbnb in south west Scotland. This is where I make a mistake. We’re currently in the process of saving up for a bigger road trip to Wales in a few weeks, so we didn’t want to book something really fancy for this trip. So I thought I’d be funny and book the cheapest Airbnb we could find in the area. To be fair, it had good reviews and all 5 star ratings. Basic, but clean. Just somewhere to rest our heads in an area of new surroundings.
We wake up on Saturday morning, ready to go and explore. However, it had just happened to be our annual British dose of snow through the previous night. Yellow and amber alerts for pretty much nearly everywhere, people stranded on motorways down south, wheel spins galore driving to work etc etc etc. Typical. We nearly didn’t go but I thought NO. I’ve been looking forward to this. I need this. I hadn’t used my camera properly since our Dutch road trip last year. If it was too bad we could just turn around and come home.
To our credit, the weather actually dramatically improved as we got towards Dalbeattie and I felt like luck was on our side. We stopped off at lots of small Scottish coastal towns and had a pretty good time seeing some amazing rocky beaches. We stretched out the day as long as possible and headed to the Airbnb as it started to get dark. We planned on doing most of proper exploring the next morning and heading home late.
So we’re both pretty tired at this point and ready for some dinner and a fire and an early night, but it takes us nearly another 45 mins to follow the directions and find the actual airbnb. As we pulled up to the farm (it was a converted outbuilding on a farm) we both looked at each other and read each other’s minds. Nope. Absolutely not.
We knew it wasn’t going to be anything spectacular, but in person it just gave off some very weird vibes. The owners hadn’t tried to make it even a little bit welcoming…. there was rubbish and wood everywhere and everything looked like it was falling apart. Fair enough, it’s a farm, but even the little house looked boarded up! Before the owners could come out and greet us we sped off into the night and panic drove 100 miles home. I’m not even joking.
Oh well. Fingers crossed our Wales trip is successful!