Heading to Scotland to Live in Our Van // S03E02

A castle. Let's go to a castle. This is exciting. This is the first of many castles. So cool. I love Scotland. shakedown run in the UK to see if we and this vehicle are fit for driving around the world and we've been testing our new mobile off-grid studio for the past few days on the side of this mountain. It's been a great place to call home. Waking up to views like this is a big part of why we live nomadically. Sharing our days with the sounds of the glorious English countryside has made this spot nothing short of spectacular. It's our first time wild camping in the UK in our finished Kombi but the weather is turning and it's doing its best to spoil our fun. Let's have a nice cup of tea. Solar's been a bit spotty today. We've not really had enough power to work but we've got a break in the clouds. We're getting some solar right now. Currently 130 watts but we did just have a moment ago where we got 350 watts so that's exciting. That's the most solar we've ever had so far. 370 would be our absolute maximum so pretty excited to be getting a little bit of solar. Pulling in currently about 7 amps which is not a great deal. Probably enough to power one of our computers editing but it's definitely helping and helps keep us up on the mountain just a little bit longer. Fortunately we have an endless supply of tea. Van life. Van life in this weather is our fun and I think the whole of Scotland and Northern England is going to be like this so it'll be interesting. Alaska it's really hard to get her dry when she gets wet so I think she's feeling a bit sick today like a bit of a cough and runny nose so we just need to keep her warm and dry and make sure we dry her off as quick as we can when she gets wet which is hard because you come in the bus and you just everything's wet in here. When we first arrived it was really windy and the next day today it's just been raining all night all day. There's a break at the moment but it's just wet really wet and windy and you can't really go outside to do anything because you just get soaked so we're just spending the day inside the van working. With the winds rising we decided to head down the mountain and point our compass north. We'd be lucky to escape the bad weather in Scotland but this was British summertime and our best window to explore the Scottish Highlands. We just left the Lake District and we're driving for an hour and we already arrived in Scotland already that quick. I didn't realize we're that close. We're in Scotland and it's not raining. That will soon change. Where to? A castle. Let's go to a castle. Castle sounds good. Turns out looking at Scotland on the map it's huge. Who would have known? So let's see where we end up. So it's getting late so we're heading to camp and we found a spot on the Park4night app and it says it's next to some ruins, some castle ruins so that'd be cool. Yeah I'm excited to see what this place is like. Apparently it's only enough room for two car spots so hopefully no one else is there we get this spot. Leah keeps asking me if every road is one way I'm like no. that goes there but I think that goes off to someone's land and somewhere around here there should be some ruins. This is exciting. This is first of many castles. I'm a castle fanatic. I take it. It's so cool. It overlooks a beautiful lake. What a view. If we still lived in a time where you could just pick a spot on earth to make your home and just build something maybe not a castle but I would totally choose this spot. Absolutely gorgeous. We've got endless supply of fish in that lake no doubt. There have been castles here on this site since the early 11th century. This is not the original but the remains of a great hall house that was built here in the late 14th century. There are ruins like this one to explore all over Scotland. At some point in history the Scots sadly had to destroy their own castles. This one and 12 others as part of negotiations to secure the release of David II from the English. He reigned as king of Scotland for over 40 years. Despite it lying in ruins this castle remained occupied for another 350 years during which time it was captured, burnt, rebuilt and sold several times. Good morning. It's raining this morning. We're definitely in Scotland because it always rains here. It was really nice yesterday. I thought we were going to have a nice couple of few days but woke up to rain which is really disappointing because I really wanted to have a coffee in the castle today but I guess we can still do it. I shouldn't let that stop us. Let the rain stop us from doing things. So we might just go and make ourselves a coffee and sit in the castle in the rain and have my morning coffee because we can because we're in a castle. Hello. I have been out to dig a hole in the rain. It wasn't raining when I set out and I'm still in a big bog. It's mud. At least it's mud. Oh no. Then I shat on my hand. Can somebody order coffee? This would have been a hall it says. The great hall where everyone would have eaten their food and I'm drinking my morning coffee in the 21st century. I love Scotland and England. It's just so rich in history. We don't have any of this stuff in Australia. Castles. I love it. Morning. We stayed here last night. This is a lock. I think I'm saying that right. Nice little free camp spot. Standby visitor centre with some wildlife. There's a brief break in the rain. All my days it likes to rain in Scotland. It has not stopped raining in Scotland. It's been very difficult to dry anything in the van. Just from the condensation in the mornings all through the day to wet clothes even when you just step out for a few minutes. Everything's wet. It's not raining now. It's good to enjoy it while it's not raining. Yeah this is like a brief break in the clouds. You can see in the clouds there's rain everywhere else. So this spot is about 50 miles south of Glasgow. Are we going to skip Glasgow? Yeah we're going to skip Glasgow. I've been there before and I think you've been there before yeah? I haven't actually been to Glasgow before but I'm not really a big fan of cities and quite keen to see the Highlands. Yes we're going up to the Highlands today and we're going to meet somebody very special that has been a huge influence on the build and has been helping out quite a lot so we're going to pay him a visit and say a big thank you in person. Yeah so north. North again. We like north. We like north. Cold north. We've just arrived in Glasgow and we are looking for gas and I think we found a gas station that sells LPG to fill up our gas tank because it's very hard to find. Lucky we found this one. Do you think it's like this all over the UK or seems like all over the UK it's like very sparingly like only some stations sell gas LPG so I keep saying gas a bit like it's petrol. LPG. That's cooking gas. Cooking gas yes. So it's definitely more expensive to get the gas here in the UK than it is in America. It's still pretty cheap it's just whether this is going to be an ongoing battle for us of how easy it is to find propane around the world. We've got a few different adapters that we have to use depending on which country we're in so that we can actually get the gas the propane into our tank and this is how we're doing it in the UK. This is our adapter which goes from our American connection on our tank because our tank's from Go Westy in California to the UK bayonet style. Okay I think that's a good connection. I'm proper nervous about doing this. I think that's good. What? That's it. Holy cow this thing uses nothing. Nothing. It's like two litres. It says minimum five litres and we've only done two. Take that off. Put the cap back on. That's it. You can open up let the gas back into the house. Fortunately filling up with petrol is a lot easier however much more expensive. We can get away with using the cheaper gas in the UK. Well the cheaper gas anywhere because our engine has got really low compression has been built to handle bad quality gas. Thank you very much CB Performance for saving us money. It is still £1.30 a litre so in American dollars that turns out to be very expensive compared to what we're paying in America for gas. Petrol gas. I went past it but hopefully that's enough to get us up to the Scottish Highlands. Muddy. Look at this though. This will do. Nice wee spot. Just outside of Glasgow found a nice lake and a nice spot camp for the night and it's really nice and it's finally stopped raining. Babes it's not called a lake. Where are you? A loch. Is loch just a lake? No it's a loch. What is it? Clearly a loch. That's a loch. It's a Scottish lake. Where does this remind you of? Definitely Alaska and Washington yeah. So similar. Beautiful. Similar kind of weather too. Raining non-stop. I wonder how cold the loch is. Can we swim in this? I think we can have a no soap bath in here. Oh flip an egg it's freezing. Celebrate. What are we celebrating? Being in Scotland. Go on. I'm not drinking it from the bottle. How bogan do you think I am? We're bogan baby. Is this really happening? Yeah. Champagne from the bottle? Yeah. You're a classy lady. How much are you loving being able to cook standing up in the combi? If we didn't have this, if we had Capito right now we'd have had to be outside in rain cooking on the floor. It's much better. Not that we're bagging our Capito. No we love your Capito. We do love Capito and we're very grateful but it is nice to have some standing room. How's the view? It's raining. I can't see anything. Look at it. Beautiful loch. Not bad. That's our garden. That's our kitchen window today. We like that. We wish we could film more of Scotland because it's beautiful but it has been raining. It's been really hard to get the camera out but we'll try to film more for you. It's so nice here. We'd like to show you more of Scotland. We'd like to see more of Scotland but visibility is down to very very limited because we're not getting the weather for it are we? No. It's summer. It's supposed to be summer. I know. Sunny on the south coast of England though so we'll be heading there next. Morning diary cam. A bit of a crazy night last night. It rained all night long. We woke up and it was super super muddy and we had a real challenge getting out of that little spot because it was very difficult to do a 15 point turn without getting the wheel stuck but after about 15 minutes of debating which route to take and choosing the right path we did manage to get out. Thankfully because there's no way we would have got a tow truck down there and I've got to our transmission performed flawlessly there with the limited slip. The wheels only span one time and otherwise just pulled us through all of the slip grass and the mud and everything so very happy to say that we have made it and we are back on the road and headed to the highlands. You're navigating right? A bit of a bit of a wet morning but it's good Scottish weather. It's day four in Scotland and it's raining again so today this morning we've found a campsite that has showers and we've found that in Scotland so far we've used a couple of showers in the campsites here and they have let us use a shower for free even though we're not staying here. So I just went up to them now and asked how much can we please pay to use the shower we're just passing through and he's been like no you don't pay for showers it's fine go ahead and use it. So I think one of the benefits I'm just guessing here one of the benefits of it raining all the time is that they have an endless supply of water which they don't mind you know giving people like us a free shower and you're probably wondering why we aren't using our shower at the back that we installed. It's mainly because it's raining and cold outside and we'd have to shower in the rain but also there's midges everywhere so the idea of showering outside in the cold in the rain with midges is not very appealing at all. So we are opting to go to campsites there's lots of campsites on our way up north and having a nice hot shower inside to keep clean and we also have a new addition to the Kombi a nice basil plant that we found in the shop for only 50p and it needed some love so we took it home and hopefully that will last a while and it makes the Kombi smell lovely. Alaska's not very happy at all she's just been inside all the time because it's too wet to play she's soaking wet hard to keep her dry. What a bug. It's so good to be clean no midges endless hot water thank you very much Scotland. As we pushed further north into the highlands the landscape changed the trees of the south disappeared and the land became marshy revoking memories of the tundra of northern Alaska. The further north we went the easier it was to find free wild camping spots. In the Americas the further north you venture the more bears there are In the UK it's sheep. We were still finding our feet in Kombi life but slowly everything was falling into place. Life off grid and on the move was happening and we were loving it. With each challenge we grew stronger and more confident in our abilities to tackle where this Kombi will take us but that is a story for next time. We hope you enjoyed our first Scottish episode we really appreciate you guys. Now don't forget to subscribe and hit that wee notification bell so you don't miss an episode and to the Kombi crew on Patreon and our wee channel members don't miss out on the extra bonus content and the very latest video waiting for you to watch and to all the Scottish people watching I am really sorry for that accent. Good job baby!