Winter wonderland
Our home away from home is a 1996 VW T4 Caravelle, ‘Oliver. We adopted him four years ago with just 69,000 miles on the clock and since then have turned him into a fully functioning Camper.
He still has all eight original seats, some of which fold down to form the bed base when we camp out. A handmade rear kitchen unit by day turns into a fold-out double bed by night and there’s also curtains, dual gas hobs, a double DIN DVD player in a custom made console, drive-away awning and other camping essentials.
Despite his age, Oliver has proven to be the most reliable set of wheels we have ever owned, and we have been up and down the country on many epic adventures with him, as well as spending three months in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Portugal last summer. This time, however, we wanted to take on the wild Highlands of Scotland.
In truth, we really wanted to fulfill a wish of taking our Van to Iceland but, naive as we were, did not realise quite how long it would take to get there! Certainly we couldn’t do it in the two weeks we had off work. Instead, we came up with a way to keep the enchanted northern adventure alive – driving six hours north to Edinburgh, taking a cheap flight to Iceland and then flying back into Scotland to do the North Coast 500.
The NC500, as the name suggests, takes in 500 miles of Scotland’s beautiful coastline. The roads are long and winding, the views spectacular, the wildlife magnificent and there are crumbling castles and quaint fishing villages around every
