Our itinerant wild camper, wanderer, hedge-botherer and semi-feral woman of the woods, Lauren Eaton, talks us through some of her 4x4 adventures out in the big wild world.
, e f i L f o g n i n a e he M
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, e s r e v i n U e th
g n i h t y r e v and E It’s no secret that I’m a die-hard Douglas Adams fangirl, I even named my workshop after Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, or in this case Landiways, the workshop at the end of the garden. I’m a self-confessed nerd, I own one or more copies of everything Adams ever wrote. The same goes for Tolkien and Pratchett. Fantasy is great fun, but I also own shelves full of very real adventures, and Mike Tomkies (a fellow Landy owner during his life) and Mike Cawthorne are two of my real-life wilderness heroes, and both share/d my passion for the Highlands.
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DO PA N'T NIC !
is the answer to life, the universe, and everything, at least according to Deep Thought, a super-computer dreamt up by Adams.
It was the age Mike Tomkies was when he first set eyes on Eilean Shona, a moment that led him to move to one of the most remote locations of the British Isles, and live there miles from the nearest people or road. It is also my 42nd birthday on 2nd October this year. Maybe it is coincidence, or something about this age/number that my heroes also felt, but over the next 12 months I will be making considerable effort to lead a life far closer to that of Mike and, hopefully, discover some of the answers Douglas was seeking. Having sold a property I barely visited, let alone lived in for many years, and having set up a base elsewhere with a fully kitted out workshop to ready the trucks (more on that later) that I can return to should I ever need or wish it, I am almost free to drive off into the proverbial sunset to live a remote, simple, semi-nomadic life.
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