Ayrshire excursions

I was just bringing the emptied bins up the path just now when I remembered the Great Bin Debacle of last week. In our street everyone follows the lead of our lovely neighbour Dougie when it’s time to put out the bins. This has always worked very well - until last week when Dougie got it wrong. The whole street was thrown into confusion. Some people put out their paper recycling bins, others their main bins. There were huddles of confused residents at their garden gates. James looked up the council website to check which bins were scheduled to be emptied and while he was still debating whom to trust, the doorbell rang. It was Dougie, who was calling round all the neighbours to apologise for his mistake! He’s such a nice chap, and after all, it’s not in any way his responsibility to be bins monitor!
In other news, I had a couple of most pleasant trips to Ayrshire last week. The first was to visit Cat’s mum Christine in Dunlop to go for a walk. We left Gerry pruning a tree and went on an undulating forty minutes walk though the gorgeous Ayrshire countryside to Dunlop Dairy, which is on the Stewarton Road. This family run enterprise has revived the Dunlop cheese tradition and makes several different varieties of cheese as well as having a traditional tea room, where Cat used to work when she was a student. We had a delicious lunch there before walking back, chatting all the way. It is a beautiful area; our walk took us along country lanes and across little bridges that were hundreds of years old, and we could see the sea with the snow capped mountains of Arran across the water. When we arrived back at their house, Gerry had not only finished pruning, he had impressively cut down another whole tree that Christine wanted rid of, bringing more light to their plum tree.
Then on Sunday I drove to Ardrossan to meet Maggie and Wendy for lunch. This was handy for Maggie to get the ferry back to Arran afterwards. I have driven through Ardrossan to the ferry terminal many times over the years, but have never dined there. Cecchini’s is a smart wee restaurant with delicious Italian food, and we had a good catch up. Wendy and I walked Maggie to the ferry before I set off back to Glasgow to see Cameron McNeish at Aye Write. But that’s another story.