Day ten was a quiet one by design. We left Skye behind and pointed the van south for Fort William, and the whole day was really about getting to the next base and settling in properly.
That base turned out to be the best campground of the trip so far, and it was not close. Glen Nevis Caravan and Camping Park sits two and a half miles into the glen off the A82, on a family estate of more than a thousand acres, with the River Nevis running along the edge of the grounds and mountains on every side. There are around 480 touring pitches across the park and it still does not feel crowded, which tells you how much room they have to play with. It opens mid March and closes in early November, so we caught it at its best.
The view is the thing. Ben Nevis rises straight out of this glen, all 1,345 metres of it, the highest ground in Britain, and roughly 150,000 people climb it every year with about three quarters of them starting from the Mountain Track right here. When the cloud lifts and you get a proper look at the tops from your pitch, it is extraordinary.
The catch is that the cloud does not lift all that often. Even in May and June the summit sits in fog more than half the time, and through winter it is closer to eighty percent, so treat a clear evening as a genuine bonus rather than the standard offering. We got a couple, including one where the last of the sun ran gold across the slope behind the van, with the girls sitting out in the camp chairs enjoying every minute.
Glen Nevis has been the backdrop for a fair bit of film work too, including Braveheart, Highlander and the Harry Potter films, which the girls thought was a very good reason to like the place even more.
Practically, this was the first site of the trip with both an onsite shop and a cafe, and after ten days of self catering in the Highlands that was music to our ears. Add a great pitch, a proper playground and genuinely superb amenity blocks, and it is close to the complete package.
The one sting was the laundry, which at seven pounds a wash was comfortably the most expensive we struck anywhere. That said, the pricing kept the machines free whenever we wanted them, which after the competitive sport of finding a spare washer in Portree was a fair trade. The whole system runs through an app that notifies you when your load is done, so you are not walking back and forth guessing. For a family of four ten days into a motorhome trip, that is worth something. For a tech nerd, it is a little pot of gold.
Dinner was a five hundred metre walk down the road at the Glen Nevis Restaurant, which was exactly the right call after a driving day. A good feed, welcome drinks, and nobody had to cook or clean in a van kitchen.
The rest of the evening went to restocking Hamish for the last leg and getting ourselves organised, because tomorrow is one of the big ones.
The Jacobite Steam Train to Mallaig.
