Never been to Millport before this trip... in fact never been to any Isle of the UK for that matter... on a big boat for the first time since the ill fated school trip to Paris in 1981, and strangely enough... Barry was with me then too. He came with me on the PX to accompany me & Gary to his first 'modern' day scooter rally... a weekend away for him as it was.

The run from Dunbar to Largs on Friday to get the ferry was fairly quick - quite local actually given that my last trip was from Dunbar to Cleethorpes. Only having to stop once for fuel makes it a local rally in my mind :)

We got on the ferry and across to Cumbrae within about 45 mins (including waiting time) - although we're told that on Saturday there was up to 3 hours waiting time ! Phew. We wheeched along to Millport's main drag in about 5 minutes and stopped at The St George pub (where the Friday night & Sat afternoon entertainment was to be) for a quick pint. There was only 4 Animals Fae Naboombu there playing pool... quite odd as usually we're last in and fighting for the bar. We found our digs soon after (basic campsites not my bag baby) and were back out on the sauce fairly sharpish. A pub crawl along the 3 main decent bars was fairly fruitless, as we didn't find anybody else... I texted Skolar to make sure I hadn't got the weekends mixed up. I then popped into the campsite, and to my relief found a pile of folk including Bert & Snail setting up their tents.

Along then to the St George Friday Do (after 2 or 6 pints in the local tavern with the islands soothsayer... or so she told me). A good mix of music was churned out and the place soon filled up , bearing in mind it's a wee place. A good night was had by all it seems until chucking out time at just after 1am.

Saturday afternoon saw loads more bodies on scoots arrive and as the small traders stalls opened for business, a band from Ayrshire called The Sessions played the usual standard scooter rally covers... Jam , Stone Roses, Who etc. They were fine, but as most folk drank outside the pub, they had a hard time with little feedback from the small crowd watching. Still... well done to the young lads.

Everyone sneaked of late afternoon to rest & eat before Saturday nights frolics, which were in the Town Hall. The place was busy from the off... with a mobbed bar fighting to keep up as the punters poured in. A wide set by the DJ's in the first half of the night went down very well, and then a couple of bagpipers turned up with a drummer to give a quick performance... or so we thought... 10 minutes later they're still there... a quick thinking DJ spotted a small gap in their play and slapped on Teenage Kicks to signal their time was up... phew indeed !

Shortly after The Jam tribute band The Underground Jam took to the stage. I've seen 3 different Jam tributes recently, them, The Jamm and The Setting Sons (not the band I was in , they were far better). The Underground variant were good, and played a lot of stuff not normally touched by cover bands. But if you only play 1 band's material.. you have to do that to vary your set... christ, our punk covers band even did Paranoid once !
For all i enjoyed their set, I still think The Jamm are a hard act to beat, their shit hot. Any hoos...

After their quite long set, the DJ's played for about another 2 1/2 hours to take us up to closing time again at about 1:30, but this time it was ALL Northern Soul , bar one playing of Tube Station. This led to around half the attendance bailing out before 12am , which meant a quiter bar... every cloud eh... I'd still have preffered a varied set, but all the peeps that stayed had fun.

So a jolly good 2 days, nice weather, breathtaking scenery and good company, nice one.