'Roamin' in the gloamin',
By the bony banks of Clyde'

We go to collect our hire car from Europcar . One look at our luggage and we are advised to upgrade - and we do. A Mercedes Benz no less! Digby tries hard to cover his delight.

Do you know that car rental companies no loner provide maps? The kind you fold out, navigate from, circle places of interest and lovingly keep for many years as a souvenir. No - you now have to have a Tom Tom. (I am told that you can get a map from any garage. Later I race into the first one we find. "Yes, yes, yes" says the smiling, eager young man and hands me the map. " It is of Edinburgh - is that alright?" No it is not!

We walk out to locate our Mercedes. There it is - sparkling peacock blue! Sadly the leather passenger seat is smeared and drizzled with ice cream - vanilla no doubt! I need to find someone to clean it - and I do! The Tom Tom does not fit the car connection and I need to take it back to the Terminal office. I leave Digby to work out all the complex, high-tech instrumentation of the Mercedes .

I develop a deep-seated hatred for Tom Tom as we attempt to get him to plan a route to the Tesco superstore in Paisley. We give up and nearly reverse (miss by a whisker) into a mini. The sight and sound of an agitated, red-haired young Glaswegian male will remain forever. Somewhat subdued and sobered we make our way to Tesco sans map and sans Tom Tom.

Digby pales visibly at the "essentials" survival list for two months in remote Skye. We wheel our trolleys out and he is quite wan. Tom Tom demurs and provides a route to Fort William. He is most pedantic and corrects us often. "At the roundabout take the fourth exit on the left" is not all that easy when merging into four lanes of traffic on a huge roundabout! He leads us onto the mighty M8 and we are soon hooning along at high speed. Digby explores the instrumentation. Suddenly, for no reason, we loose power until we are reduced to a crawl. The M8 is not the place to be slow! Frantic fiddling with instruments! Nothing works! Thankfully there is an emergency stop - and we do. More fiddling! Then as weirdly as we lost power we suddenly regain it. We rejoin the speeding traffic - onward and upward towards Skye!

We are learning much about ourselves!