I have been told that I am very lucky to get a flight from Cork to Glasgow as they have now cancelled it. So I am expecting the flight to be as empty as the flight here from Dublín. It's a surprise then that it is chock a block full and very noisy.

There are lots of Scotsmen on board and they are all talking at once and being very gregarious, could they be drunk???? I ask the cabin crew guy if there has been a football match on, but he is not a "sports kind of guy" so doesn't know. There is a very small woman sitting next to me who tells me that there has been.

Sara Chick is quite simply amazing and she quickly becomes my new best friend.

Well I don't know anyone else in Scotland.

She is English but was born with wanderlust and has lived in Cork, Australia, New Zealand and now Glasgow. She is one smart little chickie and I am instantly in complete awe of her. She doesn't have a mega bucks job, she is an ordinary hard working woman who has made smart moves and chosen to work for companies with offices abroad. She has kept her options open and made chances for herself and taken them wholeheartedly.

I wish I was like her.

If there was any doubt whether we would be friends for life it is sealed by three things.

1. She has been to see Mama Mia three times - check;
2. She has made up a game that makes fun of catholisillycism - check;
3. Whilst driving on long journeys she buys a huge buket of candy floss from the service station and scoffs the lot - check.

She tells me tales of her time in Australia when she found a python in the engine of her car, and how she drove for four days right across the centre of Australia.

The flight zips by, and as we part she invites me to stay at her flat. I told you she was amazing. I am sorely tempted but I want to explore the western coast a little before going in to Glasgow, so like a fool I turn her down. We exchange details and agree to meet for dinner in Glasgow at the weekend.

Prestwick is a spacious, clean and new local airport with trains. I board one going the opposite way from Glasgow although I don't know where. The scenery is instantly breathtaking. There are little hummocky islands out in the bay and bigger shadowy mountains looming out at sea too. I ask on the train what the islands are and a craggy face replies something unintelligble. I am a bit taken aback. I am still in Great Britain and I haven't a clue what he said. His friend repeats it a little more slowly and I think they said "The Isles of Craig". Jim and Alan are two secondary school teachers on their way home, they are still fresh from their summer break so rather than throw a blackboard eraser at me they have the outstanding kindness and patience to take me under their wing and show me how to put a ticket in the machine at the train station and subsequently wait for me for 5 minutes whilst I still can't manage to do it. They show me on the station map where to find a camping shop and campsite. Experienced teachers that they are they soon sus that I am not a bright pupil. I am sure I have a little known undiagnosed condition of "map dyslexia" They are men amongst men, or maybe they are just Scottish, and go out of their way to walk me into town to the camp shop door.

The camp shop guy is the boy who befriended Skippy the kangaroo. He has grown a pony tail in an attempt to prevent starstruck forty-year-old women who had a crush on him in the 70s from recognising him. As he is obviously shunning fame I pretend not to know who he is and just do my super cool ripstop nylon thang. The global two man tent famine has spread to Scotland, but as is becoming familiar to you dear readers I manage to get, altogether now "the last tent in the shop". It is a tomato red, one metre diameter, frisbee shape that goes up in 2 seconds like a corn kernel in hot oil . I swing it over my shoulder but my pack, complete with mats and sandals dangling precariously off it, refuses to share back space, so the tent hangs round my neck like a "Braveheart" style shield. Like a mule, only more stubborn, I trudge joyfully toward the campsite. It takes me 20 minutes of hoping I am going in the right direction. When I get there I'm a little tired and peckish. And when I say peckish what I mean is "give me carbohydates and give them to me now".

The site is unsettlingly strange and reminds me of the set of the "Stepford Wives", but with caravans. The "warden" is another tall craggy man. He scares the life out of me, and refuses to let me in. "This is a Caravan Club site" he says, "we don't allow tents here." He spits on the ground at the word 'tent', then immediately hoses it down with special Caravan Club anti-tent-septic and plants a tree with a brass plaque saying "This is where scarey Craggy McCraggy fought the battle of the pop up tent and won."

I had partaken of a mega sized smoothie on the way here and am now about to burst a gusset so I lie, say I am pregnant and ask if I can use the loo. He looks nervous at the word pregnant and, at great personal risk of penalty for infringing Caravan Club bye laws, points the way.

Walking across the campsite to the toilets there is a ghostly hush and very old people wave to me as if in a dream, have they put largactyl in the water I wonder? And then it hits me, this must be where people go when they die.!!

Still firmly in the land of the sarcasticly ungrateful and expecting others to get me out of crap of my own making I return relieved to checkpoint Craggy. He is Scottish and so calls round to see if anywhere else will "take me" "ooh roughly in the barn please I reply." He looks craggily at me and I remember I'm supposed to be pregnant. I fan my face with my hand vigourously as if I am the virgin Mary at the mercy of my hormones. I hear him on the phone saying "Aye Dougal it's a woman a-trrrravelling alone" and bingo someone has a space. He says they have promised to save a pitch for me as if this is Cannes during the film festival, not Ayrshire in September. The hallelujah pitch is approximately 3 feet from Prestwick airport, where I started from, a kingsized twix just isn't big enough ...

We don't need no bloody caravan sites.

I arrive on site looking like a badly decorated xmas tree.

I am greeted by a man in a very nice blue and white checked shirt walking towards me with open arms. God, it's Ewan McGregor, that writer's strike is having more of an effect than they know.

My pitch is on the front lawn of his huge laird style red stone house. I look for the "do not walk on the grass " sign, but there is none. I throw my tent in the air and I'm home.

The air in Scotland is so clean you can't even see it.

The next morning the sky looks frighteningly dark and I am pac a mac less. 'What happened to your red pac-a-mac you bought in Ireland?' I hear you cry. I have not been able to bring myself to "talk about it" before now, but the truth is I left it on a bus in Cork. Like Tom Hanks after he lost Wilson I cried after the bus out loud "pac-a-mac, pac-a-mac", but so far it has not come a bobbing back to me.

I glance at the newspaper in the campsite shop. The front page is warning the indigenous population to prepare for a downpour, and in Scottish terms that can't be good. So I decide to take a trip to a pac-a-mac store, in Glasgow.

The bus timetable shows that there are buses from here to Greenock. I consider going back to the campsite and asking Ewan McGregor if he will elope with me, but he would probably insist on a pre-nup and that would take all the spontaneity out of it. I then realise it's Gretna Green, not Greenock, where you can do that, so much greenness, it's getting hard to tell the difference.