Glencoe to Loch Lomond & a bit of Bond in Glen Etive, Scotland by Motorhome

One of the best parts about visiting Glencoe is leaving. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but the drive out through Glen Coe is simply stunning. We left Red Squirrel Campsite early (for us) to give us plenty of time to stop at the many parking places along the route and gawp at the scenery.

After a couple of stops at the Three Sisters car park, and the Falls of Glencoe lay by, there was only one number on our minds – 007. An unassuming turn off from the A82 takes you onto Glen Etive Road.

This single track road, with passing places, is famous for a layby about four miles down it. It’s where James Bond and M stopped to look at the view on their way to his family home of Skyfall, in the movie of the same name.

We’d been organised enough to track down where it was, we hadn’t quite been organised enough to look up the James Bond pose Jay should have struck.

Although it seems quite a few folks were, as a couple of sporty looking cars reached the layby and turned around when they saw Zagan having his Bond moment in there.

Movie magic time over, we headed back up to the A82 and followed it to the north tip of Loch Lomond.

From here it was elbows-in and full-on attention time as the road wound its way along the banks of the loch. Seemingly every bend had a tourist coach coming around in the opposite direction, taking over more of the road than they should – or at least it felt like that.

We were beyond happy when we managed to get tucked in behind a big lorry – or what we call a ‘traffic shadow’. When it turned off, we almost picked up a huge car transporter shadow, but it pulled in before we could take full advantage of its traffic clearing size. Eventually, about halfway down the loch, Jay’s knuckles were able to turn back from white to pink as the road widened out and ushered us into Balloch at the south end of the loch. Sorry folks, no photos of that stretch as I was clinging on to my chair. Zagan is left hand drive, so in the UK I’m in what we lovingly refer to as the ‘suicide seat’.

As we were a tad early to check into the campsite, we made a detour into Lidl, then rolled over to Lomond Woods campsite just before 1pm. The check-in was all automated, and I wondered how many campsites carried on with this practice after installing the kit during Covid.

Driving up to the barrier, it read our number plate, agreed we had a booking and lifted up. Then all we had to do was navigate the one way system (which spits you back out of the site if you go past the last of your type of pitch) and park in any pitch with a white post.

These were the cheap seats, well if £35 a night is now cheap? Red posts demarked fully serviced pitches and green posts were for seasonal pitches. It was all very, very organised and quite the opposite of the Red Squirrel campsite we’d just come from.

As it had stopped raining for a while we headed out for a look around Balloch. We saw signs for Loch Shores car parks and had a bit of a familiar feeling. Making our way through the car parks to the shopping centre on the banks of the loch we realised why. We’ve been here before.

Back in 2008 we did a tour of Scotland in ‘Harvey the RV’ and though we’d both forgotten about it, we must have stopped off in Balloch to a look at Loch Lomond. As it was before we were ‘Our Tour’, it’s not in our memory bank of a blog, so couldn’t remind ourselves of our visit. Unlike our second visit to Alba in Italy when we knew we’d visited before as soon as we stepped out of the van and smelled the sweet Nutella scent wafting around the town.

As we walked around the shore we tried to remember what we did last time. We don’t think we stopped here as the campsite didn’t feel familiar.

This got us into a long discussion and reminisce about how we even found campsites in those days – we only stopped in campsites back then. We didn’t have internet on our phones, and even if we did Park4Night or Search for Sites didn’t exist. We vaguely remembered an Alan Rogers campsite book we had, maybe we’d booked something from there. It’s too far back for either of us to remember, so we’ll never know.

After a good look around we headed back to Zagan to chill out for a while. Balloch is only a one night stop to break up our journey south. Our goal for Saturday morning is to be in Lanark to take part in their Parkrun.

After the epic scenery and serious concentration of today’s drive, it was lovely to just relax and do nothing other than watch telly for the evening.

Ju x