Woohoo, and other celebrations.

I have nothing against Scotland, it's a very pretty country with lots of things gong for it, and if I'd been living in a decent sized city like Inverness or Aberdeen I'd have not minded being there so much it must be said. However, my girlfriend lives in Eastbourne, my parents and brother live in Middlesex (where I go when I get a weeks' leave) and there isn't a SINGLE skirmish site to be found in all of Moray/Aberdeenshire (where my previous posting of Lossiemouth was).

I always found it strange, that there's a fair few skirmish sites right down in southern Scotland near Glasgow, then there's a big gap of there not being much population to speak of until you hit Moray and the cities of Inverness and Aberdeen, which are just at the base of the Highlands portion of the country. Yet, strangely, there aren't any more skirmish sites until you get to 2 of the most incredibly remote places in the UK, right up the tip of the highlands, and on the Orkney islands, and I've always thought this odd. It certainly put paid to my plans of taking a full set of skirmish gear (primary+secondary, eye pro, LBE, ammo, battery, charger, gas etc etc) up there and getting some games in, something I couldn't do for 1.5 years while doing my training and was really looking forward to. But oh well. To make up for it I'm now stationed about 20 minutes drive from an airsoft site which also happens to be the location for this years' 'Arnies Airsoft - Operation: Morning After', which goes to show life is indeed swings and round-abouts.

On a side note, anyone wishing to find any skirmish sites near to them, or generally get an idea of the 'lay' or spread of sites throughout the UK check this link out:

http://www.airsoftmap.net/UK/Skirmish

For the few out there who haven't been made aware of Airbana before now, I'm putting that there for a general bit of bookmark action along with the reasons mentioned above. It lists pretty much all UK/NI skirmish sites, retailers (probably just as interesting if not more so) as well as scheduled airsoft events; i.e. it's bloody handy.

So yes, back to the title, I hired a van from Europcar this last weekend to load all my stuff in to (a surprising amount if you've ever seen the size of an individual's barrack block room in HM Forces) and drove the ~550 miles from Lossiemouth to Honington, which was fun since they gave us a van which was far too big, most of the driving was at night and though I have my licence I'm yet to own a motor vehicle and have never been on a dual carriage way let alone a motorway.

Now, she probably doesn't even read this so it probably won't get me any brownie points, but have to say a big thanks to my girlfriend (Cavallin on here) for doing a lot of the driving, telling me some life saving (pretty much literally) bits of info about how to drive on motorways, and paying for diesel when I'd filled up the van and my card got declined at the till because the utter twunts at Europcar didn't tell me they were charging a £200 deposit to my card on top of the £400 for the rental. Overall though, nothing got broken in the back and I pretty much moved my whole life the length of the UK in 23.5 hours with an 11 hour stop off for a nice snooze and a full English in a spiffing little hotel near Catterick. Quite happy with that, hope to see any folks to skirmish at Tuddenham in the near future.

On a super random finishing point, here's a bit of 'Chap-Hop' that my brother (forum name Mr. Jon) put me on to via facebook. Rather fun bit of music, and you'll understand the genre title once you give it a listen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iRTB-FTMdk