Just when we thought things were getting normal, on Saturday morning before we left the house, another pickup towing a trailer showed up. It looked like our pickup and trailer, if we’d let hippies decorate the outside.

“You have to be kidding me. I don't want to go to an uninhabited island in the North of Scotland for a holiday., and I certainly don't want to spend day after day in the back of a car going round something called the 500.”

“What is the 500, by the way?”

“It is a route round the coast of Scotland. Very beautiful at this time of year. No storms, no midges and lots of beautiful seascapes and beautiful flowers. The sea will be brilliant blue and the sand will be white.”

Ellen and I were both handy with tools, but only doing odd jobs. To take a chance at something better, we entered a do-it-yourselfer reality TV show. This type of thing wasn’t for everybody. We had to be able to spend weeks on location in Key West (because it was billed as an “island getaway” to draw in viewers), and even more time there if we won. So it was ideal for people like us with no steady work.