Autumn has arrived with the Autumnal Equinox (Mabon) with more geocaching this month – although not late in the evening as it has disappeared as the nights are fair drawing in.

Kim and I were giving a talk over at Paisley at the Parkland Country Club, which was notable for having the campylobacter dangerous bug in its swimming pool and now the swimming pool had burnt down (how does that happen then?) – it required 6 teams with 30 fire fighters and 5 fire engines to get the swimming pool under control, leaving half the area in smoke damage. This was the perfect venue to lecture lawyers about the dangers of online marketing by having their web site linked off of Scotland Against Criminal Lawyers with people thinking there was no Smoke Without a Fire.

We took the chance to geocache before the talk and ended up walking around the Stanley Reservoir Dam in the middle of a housing estate around FoxBar with the picturesque Stanley Castle. The puzzle there was beyond us so we headed to the second geocache of the day outside a nuclear bunker opposite the wonderful Luma Tower at Cardonald Park, sandwiched between the A8 and the M8 with a modern decorative stone circle in the middle of a roundabout.

Our more recent geocaches included going to St Cuthberts Cave which is a splendid magical place surrounded by forest. The cave itself is scratched deep with 19th century grafitti and is where St Cuthberts follwers carried his decaying body to stop the Vikings stealing it. We climbed to the top of the hill for a marvellous view over Lindisfarne (Holy Island) and Bamburgh Castle before our springer spaniel sprung down a scramble, spraining her southpaw.

A geocacher jogged from Kelso to Lempitlaw dropped in a travel bug to our geocache and jogged back again and we had someone lazily drive to it before going off to get some 4×4 brochures after trying to get back up the hill.

I bought an Origami Picnic set, made with plastic and not paper – lighter than titanium and folds with press studs – easily washed and only a tenner – all set for the more remote geocaching exploits now.

Lunch at the Black Bull in Lauder – delicious waitresses and food was followed by a surprise birthday party for Anne Holmes-Smith at the Border Hotel in their hidden dining room. The surprise was more for us as we hadn’t expected even more food!

Visited Tweed Horizons with Jamie, our vacation student who was going back to Edinburgh Uni. Tweed Horizons is the Marie Celeste of the Borders, empty corridors and offices where was once a milling throng – wandering around with the ever helpful ‘Brian the janitor’ to see the places I used to wander around when working there.

Rerigged plane to discover all the flaws – now fixed and a test flight by Kim (with a theatrical easing back on the throttle to make us all think there was engine failure on climb out – and then I flew Kim over East Lothian – talk about back seat pilot…. nag nag nag – sometimes Mainair should think about an ejector seat that drops them out the bottom… still the plane was all set for the competition day where Kim snatched 2nd prize and I dropped balloons far too close to the judge to score any points.

My picture of the Month is Rossetti Lamenting the Death of His Wombat

I just got in frae the Isle of Skye … as the song goes

We drove up to Flodigarry, beside Flora Macdonalds cottage, where we dined, with Kim throwing up after a bad scallop, and left for The Storr. This was an ‘unfolding landscape’ experience, which consisted of groups of 25 people with head torches and wooden sticks, which I naturally twirled around my fingers and it fell onto the next persons head. We then marched in single file along a forest path for a Blair Witch Experience – Gaelic chanting and ghostly figures following us through the dimly lit forest and we struggled upwards seeing the Old Man Of Storr against a starry unusually clear sky. The glaswegian girl behind us shouted as I videoed the artistic imagery – “it just looks like a big cock”. We watched contemporary dance at the top and listened to some girl wailing endlessly whilst we stood in the pitch dark with the cold cold wind whirling around us at 2 in the morning. We got back to the Flodigarry around 3 and fell up the stairs to bed.

The next day we were on a mission – to find the Fairy Pools under the Cuillins of Skye. We were walking along the road when the mountain rescue team and ambulance arrived – there was a helicopter taking someone off the hills. They took one look at me striding towards the Cuillins – wearing a light T-Shirt, shorts and sandals and carrying a pair of swimming trunks – from their faces they made a mental note to rescue me later. We found the pools which are magical – ice cold blue water cutting natural arches and a waterfall cascading down into the pools. Stuart and I stripped off and with a shout of ‘We don’t wish to offend’ made our way in naked – the first dip was fun but very cold – after paddling for a while we decided to go in again – especially since we now had an audience of attractive women looking down at us. One of them met us walking back and used the cliche – ‘I didn’t recognise you with your clothes on’. We felt brilliant after that – our bodies revitalised and glowing.

Skye was also full of graveyards, where we found the Macleod that started the Wee Free church and chambered cairns at Vetten (in a bog). Our other mission was sent by Sybil – to visit Elgol, which is down a single track road under Blaven ridge with an impressively steep road down to the harbour. There were fabulous views of Rhum, Muck and Egg floating on silver clouds over the sea. We dined in ‘Off The Rails’ – a restaurant in a converted station but with the delight of having a real passenger train arrive and drop off and pick up passengers whilst you dine on fabulous seafood.

It was the last day so we geocached in Plockton (being the first to find this one even though several had tried!) and after derigging the plane it was off to Applecross – to find the geocache there and to drop off the Mike travel bug (although he was really wanting to go to Paris I felt that overlooking Skye was much classier). On coming down the highest road in Scotland to the bottom to see a cyclist making his way up – he was set for a gruelling ride – I wasn’t too sure if Mrs Forester and I could do that.

I ended up in the Plockton Inn bar with a New Zealand waitress, Finnish faith healer and author of Hawaiian books, an American bagpipe competitor and the only local – a waitress with ‘Plockton Inn Seafood Restaurant’ printed on her left chest, who had someone in that evening asking if they did anything other than seafood in their seafood restaurant. A previous night the bar was filled with student veterinarians discussing the most disgusting things they had done with animals, and an attractive tattooed blonde who evicts people in Aberdeen. Plockton is not without its characters – Hamish Macbeth was well set here.

The Microlight fly-in to Plockton started with me sitting on the runway at East Fortune in a howling gale with Kim on the radio reading out wind speeds with gaps (the gaps were when the wind speed would put me off flying…)

I took off with my bike in the back, an untested exhaust weld, new spark plugs , a full fuel tank and a radio that stopped working as soon as I was over the choppy Forth. A light plane and a tornado jet flew under me at speed as I ambled along in a 20 knot headwind (perhaps I should have cycled) as I tracked towards Crieff for a flight over the lochs to Oban.

I was flying over Loch Earn under cloud and under the mountains where I was receiving a damn good thrashing from the rotor off the munros so chose to go over Loch Voil over the clouds which left me freezing at 8,000 feet before descending over Cruachan Dam and over the still waters painted by sunset to a circuit OVER Connel bridge and a cross wind landing slapped onto the runway.

Two microlight club members at Connel helped me into their hanger, I booked a room over my mobile, assembled my bike and cycled in the wrong direction into a quarry, and then back over Connel Bridge to the ‘Wide Mouthed Frog’ at Dunstaffagne Marina. I had two offers of lifts but after having spent a lot of money on a folding bike, haraunged my son to get it all ready and then flew the damn thing with a pedal stuck in my shoulder for the past 3 hours, it would have been churlish to not get on the thing.

The Polish hotel receptionist refused to believe I had a booking, although there had been some chap called Mr Forester who booked a twin room on a mobile phone from Connel airfield only half an hour ago. Mrs Frog came to the rescue and I was soon in my twin room with my wife ‘Mrs Forester’, my newly christened bike who preferred to watch a programme on Female Orgasms (whatever they are) on the hotel telly than be handcuffed outside to a drainpipe in the rain.

The next day was pouring down so I cycled to Oban and on the steep hill careered down with the wet brakes not stopping me and ended up down a one way street the wrong way and through a chaotic mountain bike course of pedestrians and roadworks to emerge breathless on the pier.

The weather improved so it was time to jump into a taxi with Mrs Forester bundled in the boot back to the Frog and cycled over the Connel bridge to see the Falls Of Lora, an impressive tidal phenomena which looks like a maelstrom under the bridge. At the airfield a float plane had already been around 7 lochs and took off for more – its undercarriage retracting leaving its floats for the water. A couple of autogyros where also taking off with one of them being the UK expert in autogyros, apparently because the other 9 had died.

Refueled and eyeing the low cloud with trepidation I started a take off roll to abort quickly as Bert landed straight in front of me. Once clear I took off and headed under cloud over Mull through a gap in between stoney mountain s and cloud to get thrown about in all directions and emerge a religious man over the sea. It was stunningly beautiful at two thousand feet underneath with sandy beaches and blue water – when another microlight was on a head on collision route with me – he descended and I banked to starboard – that certainly woke us all up. I was travelling at 90 miles per hour so we missed each other with seconds to spare. Three near misses (two with other microlights and one with a mountain) I reassured myself that nothing else could go wrong.

Crossed the hydro electric cables and got hit with rotor off a mountain and enjoyed the aerobatic feeling of being all over the sky – that settled down and with Plockton runway just over a ridge I started to feel confident that it was all over. The I hit the ridge – sinking air was driving me towards the ridge at speed (I was still travelling around 90mph straight towards the ridge) I managed to fly over it with wing drops and a lot of praying – unable to change the altimeter for landing I managed to do some down wind checks whilst hurtling down over the sea to the runway – aimed straight for the numbers, rounded out and then got hit by rotor coming off the trees at the end of hte runway – ballooned off the runway, cross wind took me towards the beach and not the nice runway – struggled with all this feet off the surface and planted it down in front of a crowd of microlighters… who I then joined to watch anyone else trying to land in the same conditions…

Our only other flight was with Kim who flew me over the sea to Skye (which was magically without cloud) and we derigged to get the machine back to East Fortune – although we did get stopped by the police outside Edinburgh with Stuart driving – they noticed that our rear number plate had fallen off (although Kim had written in the registration to legally cover us!)