Scottish Island Hopping in a Motorhome?

We’d not planned to go Island Hopping in Scotland, but that’s what we ended up doing. Island hopping in a 23 foot motorhome? A crazy idea? Were we mad? No! It’s dead easy. So here’s the story.

Originally, the plan was to drive from Derbyshire to the Kintyre Peninsula and back, taking in various stops both ways. Then a friend asked had we thought of taking the ferry from Ardrossan to Brodick, and another from Lochranza to Claonaig? Where to where? Who was Brodick and what was Claonaig?

A visit to the excellent Caledonian MacBrayne Ferries Website, and online ordering of their brochure made things a little clearer. We ended up chosing Island Hopscotch 16 ticket (£220 for up to 10m motorhome and 2 passengers) – Arran – Kintyre – Islay, which took us from Ardrossan to Brodick, Lochranza to Claonaig, Kennecraig to Port Ellen, and Port Askaig to Kintyre. Sounds confusing? Yes, a bit, but all will become clear in future blogs.

One hiccup occurred, resulting in us having to change our return journey plans at short notice - we mistakenly thought the Hopscotch ticket got us back to our starting place of Ardrossan – uh-uhh - not true – it only got us back to Kintyre Peninsula. That’s what happens when you don’t read the small print. So instead of retracing our steps, we travelled back via Inveraray and Loch Lomond, down through Yorkshire, and back to Derbyshire - seeing places we would otherwise have missed. All done in two weeks – and it felt like we’d been away for a month.

And what an absolutely amazing holiday experience it was. We will be writing about it in bite-sized chunks in the next few blogs.