Menootnaboot; Fife

Yes, the park-ups in Fife were winners—when I could get to them! A couple defeated me. You saw the first one in yesterday's post. To be fair, it wasn't anything spectacular in the views section, but it served a fine purpose and I was most grateful for it. Particularly as it was entirely free. 

Having done my shopping that Monday morning, I wanted to go to Lower Largo for a charge and have lunch. Now, I believe I mentioned yesterday how WEE these fishing ports are. They were built when horses and carts were the transport of choice. They are narrow. I said, N.A.R.R.O.W. With sharp corners. You'll have an idea if you've ever been a model village. Gorgeous. Requiring more than tin foil nerves to negotiate in an elephant masquerading as a van. All good, though, and L/Largo delivered! I mean, look at this:

The wind carried knives of ice, but that sun was out, and I had to don a hat and specs!!! Take another look.

Yeah, baby!!! While The Grey sucked juice, I utilised the toilet block, accessed water to refill my tank, had my lunch sitting on his back step, spoke with passing locals, loved on a pair of spaniels and chatted with their peeps, chatted with a local bird watcher, chatted with the Robin who seemed to think I had made lunch for him too... (three pics - attitude - and to truly make this post valid for NF with the LLB gang!), and all-in-all had a most pleasant couple of hours.

Moving eastwards along the coastline, then, I had intended my next park to be at Pittenweem. However, the park had been closed that very day, for the week, in order to be resurfaced. The first of no less than four - FOUR! - multipoint turns were then executed by Grey's six metres in roads only eight metres wide. With big walls and or fences preventing overhang. The next place along, very close to Anstruther, proved impossible for Google to comprehend, and this is where she took me down the path strewn with IEDs in the form of speed bumps, resulting in the damage I showed you yesterday. After the first couple, I did manage them better; however, it wasn't enough to have to face them once, we got to the end of the track to discover it was a dead end, and this was the second multipoint turn of the day, this time with the risk of going down a small cliff on one side and a six-foot high grass bank on the other of the barely eight feet wide track. Sigh. A couple of miles back, at Anstruther, another attempt at a park proved impossible due to the aforementioned NARROW and SHARP and add in EXTREMELY STEEP access... third multipoint turn. The next park with any appeal was the town centre carpark in Crail. It was still narrower and sharper, but this time, it was a little more negotiable, and I did reach the spot, only to find all the spaces taken. Fourth multiturn. By now, it was approaching five in the early evening, and time I had settled and started tea. The teeth were beginning to grind. There may have been growling. And HBO language.

Hello Kingsbarns!!! This was a paid parking spot, but golly, it was welcome, and I was happy to give them the ten quid a night for two nights. Although - if I were to be picky - for that money, I might have expected less than a lunar landscape surface and that all the toilets were accessible, rather than one out of the seven being open and all and sundry sharing it.

That's not even showing you the three giant ponds in front of The Grey... However, they actively support van life, and I enjoyed my walks along the beachfront and finding a lovely bit of wood for my shelf fix. 

You can see some of these places in the second video of the series for this trip, including my use of a nifty neck hanger for the Gopika at Kingsbarns so that I could try some 'bodycam' filming. Like most of my video work, it needs practice, but there's potential! Oh, and here's a pretty primula, spotted in some beach art garden at L/Largo - you know, Nature Friday and all...

Okay, this is getting long already... the rest of the Fife part of the trip coming up on Monday!