Birthday Shopping

Last year on my birthday we headed to Dunoon as I was right in the middle of down regulation for our frozen embryo transfer and didn't feel like travelling too far afield. This year the down regulation for our current frozen transfer has started but we're not as far through it yet so we decided to follow our usual plan of heading to Oban for my birthday shopping trip.

Oban has a special place in our hearts as the first place Mr Click and I lived together (for a whole six weeks while I was on a teaching placement) was Appin and on a Friday or Saturday we would head into Oban for shopping and Chinese. I love the collection of charity shops there and we have our routine down to a fine art.

It meant a fairly early start for a Saturday (6am! Yikes!) and we headed off the top end by about 7:45am. We had planned to listen to music from Spotify I'd put onto my phone but we couldn't get the phone to connect to the car we were in, but we'd brought CDs so it was all good.

I love a good long car drive. We chatted, sang along to the music, admired the houses we were passing, kept an eye out for wildlife and tiny lambs. The journey was as much a part of the trip as the actual shopping expedition.

As usual we stopped off at a cafe when we arrived for a spot of breakfast (and after a one hour, forty-five minute drive, the loo) and then got down to the serious business of shopping. Often when I go charity shopping I'm heading out with a particular purchase in mind; new work tops, a particular book, board games, whatever. This time I didn't really have anything in particular other than a vague idea that I wanted to buy more knitting books.

Sadly, old knitting books were rather thin on the ground. There were a couple of old 1980s jumper books, which aren't my thing, and lots of odd patterns pulled out of magazines which were rather jumbled and none of them were especially 'vintage' or for toy patterns so I gave them all a miss.

I'd mentioned to Mr Click that I'd like to get some funny DVDs to watch after our frozen embryo transfer and we hit the big time in the first shop we went into with Pirates An Adventure With Scientists, The Tale of Despereaux, Miss Congeniality and Practical Magic. The latter two are old favourites that I've been wanting to pick up for ages.

I gathered a fairly impressive collection of books over the course of the day as well. I spotted The Life of Pi in one shop for about £2 and decided against if as I knew I'd be able to get the Kindle version cheaply, then found it in the last shop we went in to for 50p. I took that as a sign and grabbed a copy of it right away (along with two other cheapie books).

We also did a nice big shop to fill up our cupboards with goodies. Then headed back to Inveraray for sweets and takeaway to fortify us for the last leg of the homeward journey.

So now I've got to squeeze another seven books onto my bookcase (which I only rearranged a few weeks ago). But I had a brilliant day out and it was the perfect way to finish off my birthday.