We're on holiday. Yesterday, we drove 350miles to Kirkby Lonsdale. Today it's another 250m miles to our home for a week, a cottage just beyond Lochgilphead on the west coast of Scotland. I wish there was a route like Todd's across the Carisso Plain on highway 58, but in this overcrowded island, there's no real alternative to the busy motorways. Though the route takes us through some spectacular scenery, few places to stop, and where you can stop, all you see is a service area. These are mostly awful places where you never find shady parking, and while your car bakes in the sun you can be avoiding eye contact with your fellow travelers as you queue for overpriced franchised coffee. In the toilets, the soap dispensers offer a substance that looks and smells like soap but somehow leaves your hands greasy. You leave feeling slightly grubbier than you arrived.

But the road is pretty clear as make our way north, and even the roadworks as we pass Carlisle don't slow us down to much. From there, the M6 becomes the M74 heading to Glasgow, where we cross the city on the M8. But then we hit traffic and queue for an hour to cross the Clyde on the Erskine bridge. This isn't any fun, but once over the bridge we're heading north again, towards the shore of Loch Lomond where we stop for a bit, have some lunch and I take this picture.