Friday 20th June 2025

A long 2hr20 drive in sweltering heat, we headed east along the M8 and then onto the A720…and that’s when things stopped for a while, I dunno if we’re unlucky or not, but any time we get onto the A720 it’s always really slow going.

Once we got onto the A68 it was pretty empty (apart from a really slow moving lorry who did at least pull into a layby), one thing we did learn is that the AC in the van is very good.

We arrived at Coldstream Holiday Park, collected a “late arrival envelope” and made our way round to Pitch T01, we had to get onto the levellers, but we were handy for all the facilities.

The site was pretty busy (I don’t think there was a free campervan pitch).

We were straight out for a walk into Coldstream - it was very, very hot and most things were closed, but it’s nice wee town.

We wandered down in the direction of the river, but the sun was beating down.

We popped into Co-op for rolls, coleslaw, herby chicken, egg mayo filler, scotch eggs and cherries and berries Old Mout, a not bad haul.

Back to the van and we had a very nice cold meal and sat out, with it being very close to the river there were a lot of flies around (but fortunately not midges).

It was after 10pm when we went off to bed.

Saturday 21st June 2025

The longest day of the year and what felt like a long night, it was very hot and muggy in the van, even with the windows open, there wasn’t a lot of breeze, the fan did help a fair bit to get to sleep, but I woke several times because I was too hot. We were hoping that the white van would reflect more of the heat from the van than the older dark grey.

Knowing that it was to be even hotter than yesterday, We were up and out early, down to the Tweed, beautiful views over the river just down from the Coldstream bridge at the “Nun’s Walk”.

Breakfast in Streamers, really nice full Scottish and we popped into the bakers and got some chutney and baguettes for lunch.

We returned to the Co-Op for some cheese and ham and then back to the van for a relaxing morning while it was still cool reading under the awning.

I managed to get the drone up and captured some shots of the site and the river.

It was warming up tho’, and getting quite windy so we pinned down the awning but a large gust of wind had it bending so we rolled it back in.

Then it started to rain and we just got our stuff in before it came on pretty heavily . It cooled a bit and I finished The Hidden Ways by Alistair Moffat and Gayle finished her Stephen King book (Full Dark No Stars).

We relaxed until around 5:30 and headed out for a walk, we headed back towards Coldstream bridge and crossed the bridge into England.

On the way back, we popped into Henderson Park, it’s a really nice spot with great views over the Tweed - we sat for a while in the hot evening sun.

After getting a little cooked we headed over to The Besom, a couple of Cold Aspalls and we decided to get food.

I had the Katsu curry and rice which was great, and Gayle had a steak pie and chips and peas (luckily, because they had sold out, but turned out to have one left!).

For dessert we had almond and raspberry tart and a white chocolate and raspberry sundae which was very nice.

Back to the van, still 22c and we sat out ‘til 9:30pm and it started to rain, a quick look at lightningmaps.org indicated lightning over Northumbria, but quite far from where we were staying.

We sat up reading until bed time, but then the storm did hit us, and it was spectacular.

Lightning.org was showing 22 strikes per minute before we lost signal, but that doesn’t really describe how wild it was.

The rain was torrential and hail too…no idea how the folks in the tents handled it, it went on for around 2 hours, and it was a pretty wild ride.

Sunday 22nd Hune 2025

Not much sign of last night’s storm other than some small puddles on the paths, it was bright and sunny but with clouds overhead and pretty windy.

High winds were forecast for later so we headed off pretty early, looking over the camping area there didn’t seem to be much damage from the night before which was impressive, other than the dish-washing area had around 5mm of water on the floor (someone must’ve left the door open!).

We returned via the same route, and on the M8 we spotted an impressive swarm of Amazon Prime vans…53 vans!