Blogging at 21:05 on Tuesday 24th December from intended overnighting spot N 55.65607°, W 04.19171° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:55.65607%2C-04.19171
It's been a wholly grey and miserable day with pretty much constant mizzle doing it's best to dampen our spirits. It didn't succeed.
The drive north up the M74 was a pretty quiet affair. Wherever the much-reported holiday-getaway nose-to-tail traffic currently is, it wasn't on the M74 when we were.
The conspiratorial grey continued as we left the motorway and started threading through the numerous small towns and villages that we had to thread through in order to reach the tenuous oasis in which we currently find ourselves.
In fairness, there were some nice properties here and there, but many were also very skanky. A huge fly-tipping problem was also extremely prevalent. In this regard, we feel sure the numerous government / local-authority provided travellers' sites we passed were purely coincidental. For sure, this isn't the finest sprawl of Scotland we've ever encountered. In fact - if it isn't already - it should be twinned with Doncaster.
Anyway, map-features to the rescue and all that; we dutifully cleared the dross and are now hunkered in a bit of wild upland complete with windswept moors, coniferous plantations and the by-now-ubiquitous wind farms.
We're still quite a bit short of tomorrow's intended parkrun but if we'd have ventured much closer we'd have started to flirt with the conurbations of Glasgow. And so, the windswept and mizzly cloudbound moors it is!
To be honest, it's absolutely no hardship. The truck is toasty-warm, is providing its usual loyal service and is extremely comfortably housing us in a location where a more obvious counterpunch to the profligacy, commercialism and artificiality presented by the Joys of the Season would be hard to imagine.
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