A mate of mine from uni (this is about 30yrs ago)
had a Scottish surname, even though he was deeeeeply Cornish. He'd never been, so I said "Hey, let's go bivvying in the land of your forefathers". He agreed, and we set out to the wilds. It turned out that I knew what I was doing, and he didn't. I had the kit, but he didn't. It also turned out that it was the worst winter Scotland had seen for a loooooooooooong time. There were 10ft snowdrifts on Skye FFS.
His winter kit was a pair of army and navy boots (holed) and a bike jacket (real leather though..).
We survived, he got laid (and closely avoided a severe beating) and for some reason I joined a team for the annual Dunvegan village quiz, which we won (despite one of the tasks being 'Complete the following well-known Gaelic proverb...)! My name is still on a trophy shield somewhere.
One night we met a bloke in the bar of the Misty Isles Hotel who heard of our bivvybag insanity, and said 'I'd not let a dog sleep out in this' and promptly invited us to his home on a peninsula with a view (which we woke up to in the hungover morning) that would make a poet from a London traffic warden.
I still have a picture of me doing the -12 but sunny topless pose by the lochside (blue nipples).
I had my first ever cannabis(pipe)-induced out-of-body experience from a snow cave we dug on a hillside at the northernmost tip of Skye, when I found myself floating between the inner and outer Hebrides, watching a pod of probably fictitious orcas swimming leisurely like oversized dolphins in the winter anticyclone-flattened sea, from a few hundred feet up.
Don't expect a punchline :@ )
( blyerkit e k trilby, Fri 30 Mar 2012, 0:32, 2 replies)

Orcas
are fictitious.

Killer whales are real though.
(magic the cat will someone please think of the kittens, Fri 30 Mar 2012, 13:55, closed)

Probably porpoises...
... which do look like oversize dolphins, and the peninsula was probably Ardmore at the northern tip of Waternish. I used to live a couple of miles down the road from that. Amazing sunsets.
(gordonjcp, Fri 30 Mar 2012, 17:45, closed)