From Home to Shiel Bridge
Their camera had broken down, so I took a picture of Kate and Tim, and then Tim took one of me with Kate and my rucksack.
and 
I was very lucky to have run into Tim and Kate, because they'd done the Challenge 6 times already (!) and I was able to ask them lots of questions on the journey to the next town. I became even more excited than I'd already been, in listening to their answers and hearing about the experience that lay ahead of me.
At the next town there was a change of trains, and I met a larger bunch of Challengers on the platform. I was struck by the realisation that for the last 25 years people had been gathering at stations across the country on the Thursday of the second week of May, in order to travel up to Scotland and walk for two weeks. It seemed bizarre that I'd previously known nothing at all about it!
Anyway, we set off for Glasgow, and arrived not long after 11.30am. Again, I was able to chat on the way to people who'd done the Challenge before, and I met a man who'd managed to get his total (backpacking) pack weight down to a truly amazing 7.5kg!
I'd noticed on the journey up that almost everybody else was wearing some form of Paramo wind shirt, and so I decided to just have a little look at them when I got to a good gear shop in Glasgow... Perhaps fortunately, though, I was told when I got there that there wasn't a Paramo stockist in town, and so I retired to Borders' bookshop instead, to browse through the restaurants section in search of a good place for lunch.
I wasn't able to find what I was looking for, but I decided to ask two women standing next to me if they could suggest a place that would do good veggie lunches. By a happy coincidence it turned out that they were on their way to lunch at just such a place, and so they invited me to walk along with them. At 'The Living Room' I had deep fried salt & pepper squid with cucumber relish (outstanding!), a house salad with goat cheese (hmm... I wasn't quite as keen on that) and broccoli with hollandaise sauce, preceded by a nice G&T and accompanied by a glass of red wine.
After that I made my way over to Glasgow Buchanan Bus Station, where I got onto the bus to Shiel Bridge. The bus stopped for about 45 minutes in Fort William, and I jumped off and ran panting through light drizzle to the kit shops in the main drag, where (again, perhaps fortunately) my further attempt to find a Paramo wind shirt came to nothing when I realised it was after 6pm. We soon got going on the bus again, and arrived in Shiel Bridge just after 8pm.
I was staying that night at the Kintail Lodge Hotel, and after hauling the rucksack up to my room...
...I went down to the bar pretty quickly, in order to be sure to be in time for dinner. There I had a most delicious vegetarian haggis with clapshot, and spent the evening having enormous fun with 3 other Challengers: Jack, Bob and Brian. Jack was a first timer like me (although he's walked just about everywere else, and done all of the Munros), but Bob and Brian had done it several times before, and were planning to whizz across in 7 days!
Although I'm not really a whisky person, it seemed churlish not to try some the night before embarking on an epic Scottish hike, and so we all tried out the 15 years' old Laphroiag - it tasted really wonderful, so we had some more, just to check it hadn't been some sort of fluke... Mmmm :-)
It was well after midnight before I got up to bed, and I think we were the last to leave the bar. (With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that a bit of a pattern began to establish itself at that stage :-) Anyway, I fell asleep so quickly that I have absolutely no recollection of actually lying in the bed until the following morning, when I awoke, exhausted, to sunshine :-)
Return to Home page -- Next page