One of the (many) good things about falling for a West Coast guy is discovering a whole bunch of new day-trip type places. Like, the kind of places you used to go in the summer holidays when you were little, when your Gran would come along too, where you would have a picnic (and an ice cream if you were good).
Wine, sandwiches, Kettle chips, Cadbury’s fingers, homemade banana bread and a Kinder egg. Not the classiest picnic in the world but we loved it.
And while the East Coast crowd have their St Andrews’ and their North Berwick’s and their, the go-to destination for the Weegies seems to be Loch Lomond.
Which is a pretty nice place for a day out.
John has been going to Balmaha for years – for hill-climbing, picnic-ing, boating and, more recently, photographing. He took me there for the first time in 2008 and we’ve since gone back time and time again in summer…
… and in the dead of winter…
I absolutely love boats and being on the water so when John told me you could hire a motorboat from Balmaha Boatyard and spend the whole day exploring the loch I was pretty frigging excited. We planned to do it in Summer ’08 but didn’t ever see it through and then Summer ’09 also came and went without our day of boating fun. And this is why ‘Hiring a boat at Balmaha and spending the day on Loch Lomond’ made it on to the List.
We finally got round to it on the August bank holiday weekend, which was amazingly one of the sunniest days of the year. The flipside to that of course is that ‘Hiring a boat at Balmaha and spending the day on Loch Lomond’ proved to be a popular day out for a whole lot of other people too and by the time we got there all the motorboats were gone. We were left with a rowing boat, meaning we quickly abandoned our plan to ‘tour the loch’ and settled for a little jaunt to a fairly close island… where we abandoned ship for lunch in the sun on our own little private beach. Wine, sandwiches, Kettle chips, Cadbury’s fingers, homemade banana bread and a Kinder egg. Not the classiest picnic in the world but we loved it.
