Coming Home
By Angela Johnson
The Highlands is a community of love, support and understanding, it's welcoming and challenging with unspoilt rugged beauty...
The Highlands chose us as residents, through years of wonderful experiences and our need to be free of the city life and to be back in touch with community and nature.
We had a shaky start to our journey, first finding our dream house, losing it to a higher bidder and then after the first sale fell through, securing it. We were giddy with enthusiasm as we headed out on the 9 hour journey north to pick the keys up to our future home. On reaching Inverness, our peace was shattered with our broken down car. The Highland Breakdown team quickly got us back up and running with just enough time to collect the keys, before the collection point office closed.
With big smiles, we entered the building to be greeted with blank faces as they knew nothing of any keys. Our hearts sank, what had we done, was this the life we intended? We set off anyway towards our new home, with heavy hearts; we looked around it to see if any doors were open. We were now stranded at our dark cold empty house but the garage door was open. We plugged in the electric heater as our eyes met over a celebratory bottle of wine, in a bleak garage in Oldshoremore; we both laughed. It had to get better than this!
In the darkness of night, a car turned into the drive and our new Highland neighbour called out, 'Welcome to Oldshoremore, follow me and we'll get you warmed up, we've sent someone to get your keys from Inverness so you'll be in within two hours, so come, enjoy some hot soup.' The next morning we realised we had no oil in the tank for heating, yet, within hours, we had 7 heaters collected from neighbours to help us get through Christmas.
The Highlands is a community of love, support and understanding, it's welcoming and challenging with unspoilt rugged beauty. Everything we love about the Highlands was summed up in those first few days, and since then our experience has just got better. We love the Highlands.
We Want to Hear From You!
Share your stories of your community in the Highlands and Islands
Stories are at the heart of what we do as a project and we are always looking to learn more about what the Highlands and Islands means to people who live, work, and visit here.
The connections between a person and their community are vital to the very essence of a place. We would love to know, how does the 'Spirit of the Highlands and Islands' manifest itself in your community? Tell us below, we can't wait to hear from you!
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