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2024 Outer Hebrides – Day 01 “Team Mercedes head North”

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2024 Outer Hebrides – Fuzzy Water
Day 01 Friday 16th Aug Travel to Oban “Team Mercedes head North”

The 2024 plan was to travel to the Outer Hebrides and remain flexible with either shorter trips or extended camping trips. These would all be dependent on the prevailing weather forecast. This approach had proved very useful during the previous year’s trip to the West Coast of Ireland and would enable us to Island hop from South to North.

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10 club members signed up for the trip in February and the transport was sorted (4 cars) and then the ferries were booked. We opted to go from Oban to Castle Bay ferry paddle a bit on Barra and then journey north taking the Ardmhor Barra to Eriskay ferry. We then intended to spend the rest of the week on South Uist and Benbecula before taking the Berneray to Leverburgh. The second week would be spent exploring Harris and Lewis before taking the Tarbet to Uig ferry back to Skye and journey home from there. We were glad we had the ferries booked as the mainland ferries were all fully booked. We were able to change the times and dates of the inter-island ones by travelling very early in the morning.

Day 01 Friday 16th Aug Travel to Oban “Team Mercedes head North”

Part one of day one of the Outer Hebrides trip for me was a drive up to Formby from the Chilterns to join team Mercedes for the drive to Oban to rendezvous with the rest of the group to catch the ferry to Barra.

Arriving just past midday the boats and gear were soon loaded and after an amazing omelette for lunch made by our leader, Team Mercedes (Keith, Frankie and Debbie) set off. The M6 presented the first challenge but local knowledge and a diversionary route through Preston dealt with that. The further north we travelled the more glorious the scenery became and after a couple of stops along the way, we hit Glasgow around teatime so obviously the thing to do was stop for fish and chips at Simeones. Fish, chips and mushy peas (no gravy or curry sauce for me thank you very much) and a can of Irn Bru. The holiday had definitely started.

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Fully fuelled for the final leg of the drive we eventually got to our wild camping spot about 10.45 pm just as the rain started and the wind picked up. Tents were quickly erected and crawled into for our first night’s wild camp of the trip.

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