Aye, it's a wee bit special

There is an imaginary list of places I’ve always wanted to visit. In the last two years, I’ve been slowly ticking them off and now it’s time to put a line through another, Scotland.

My arrival coincided with the hottest day of the year in Glasgow. This meant the trains were delayed (the infrastructure isn’t designed to deal with 30-degree heat) and so long story short I made my connecting train with literally 30 seconds to spare. Running through a foreign city to an unknown train station was not the ideal start.

As I hoped, the train ride was very scenic and I got a glimpse of some of the beautiful towns I will be able to call on in the next month or so. The landscape reminds me a lot of home and the coastline is brilliant. I imediately feel comfortable and relaxed here and wonder if my ancestry has anything to do with that.

First stop was to a place called Johnshaven. This is a small, sleepy fishing village on the east coast. I was there for two weeks doing a housesit and looking after one cat, Gibson and one dog, Midge.

Lyndsey and Chris, my hosts, were very accommodating and generous. I had free use of an electric bike, which I put to good use and they left me enough food to almost last me a week. The latter is not something a house sitter would normally receive.

They also have a guest house in the village called Puffin Cottage. I recommend anyone who is thinking of going to Johnshaven (and you should) to have a look at the availability. www.cottageguide.co.uk/puffin

Johnshaven was the perfect place to start my Scotland adventure. It’s small as I said but peaceful, quiet, and interesting as well. The people are ultra-friendly and it’s a perfect spot to tour other villages in the area. Every street has a name which was also formally known as something else.

I had plenty of time to go wandering around so I visited quite a few places such as Stonehaven, St Cyrus, Melrose and Gourdon. All of which have their own unique quality. Some smaller and some larger. Some have great nature reserves like St Cyrus and some like Stonehaven have castles as the main attraction.

Time flew by and before I knew it I was setting off to the south for another house sit. In a short while I’ll be heading to a town called Laurencekirk which isn’t far from Johnshaven so I'll surely have more to write about the area.