It was still raining but we decided to pack up and move on anyway. The weather was turning quite nasty and it made driving any significant distance quite a trial. We were feeling pretty miserable with the leaking van, wet awning stashed inside the van, and rain lashing down outside.

Vic was obviously upset with the way the weather was going, so she found us a hotel near Greenock and we booked ourselves in for an evening of relative dryness. As we turned off the motorway toward the hotel, the road was a foot deep in water, and as we climbed the hill further up, several streams had formed across the road. The Gleddoch Country House Hotel was a bit pricey, the restaurant even more so at £35 per head for a relatively small menu without drinks, but we needed a break. The “country house” part of the hotel had actually burned down earlier in the year, leaving only the ruins and a relatively recent annex.

At about 1am I ran down to the van to make sure that it wasn’t leaking too badly. The tail end of Hurricane Alec was causing torrential downpours across the country, and the rain here was even heavier than we’d experienced at Maybole.