Friday 13th February 2026

Our second trip of the 2026, it’s been five weeks since The Woods…we were at The Scottish Motorhome, Caravan & Holiday Home Show last weekend.

We’ve been to Moffat five times - it’s definitely one of our favourite sites, and we needed a bit of relaxation time, and early in January I’d contacted Moffat Community Observatory about visiting the weather was looking good.

We pitched up on the “new” pitches and it was still quite light and headed over to the Co-Op to grab some bits to accompany dinner, we had to be at the observatory by 7:30pm.

It was a beautiful crisp clear cold evening…and we had a quick pasta dinner and donned our cold gear to hear round to the observatory, it’s not easy to find, and we had to go a long way around but we got there.

When we got there, it had clouded over and wasn’t looking good…but Sunny was our volunteer host, and miraculously the sky cleared and we had a great view, it was a really interesting night, and we got to see a number of exciting objects including Sirius, Andromeda, Jupiter and learned a lot. Very much worth visiting for us.

We headed back to the van for a hot chocolate to warm up (it was -3C outside) and then headed off to bed.

Saturday 14th January

It was pretty cold overnight, I think it got down to -4C so we had the heating on to keep us warm (and prevent the water from being dumped by the Truma) and we got up around 8am and got dressed and headed around to Ariete for breakfast.

I had the Corn bread, black pudding bacon and eggs with a spot of honey mustard, it was really really nice, the corn bread had a very different texture.

Gayle went for the scrambled egg on corn bread with an extra bit of black-pudding.

We bought a couple of slices of their amazing Ecclefechan tart and picked up some bits and pieces from around the town shops (including a visit to the Moffat Toffee shop).

We returned to the van spent some time reading until around 4pm when we headed out to see if we could get an early dinner…nope…most things were closed or fully booked…ooops!

We grabbed some cheese, charcuterie, crackers and wine from Co-Op and headed back to the van for dinner.

We watched a couple of episodes of Fringe and then “Blood Simple” which was great.

Sunday 15th January

Woke up to snow on the overhead window and looked out the window and it was a Winter wonderland outside.

We had a light breakfast of a scone from our shopping yesterday by 9am the thaw was on so we got packed up and headed back up the M74 home and we were back by 11:15am.