65.78 kms: Inversnaid-Doune-Ardleish-Inverarnan

Well that did it! I think I have permanently lost some use in both of my knees! Whoo! They say that today's stretch is the hardest of the route. It is certainly the most arduous. It hugs the cliff-side around the Loch for about five miles, popping torturously up and down rocky paths, darkened under overhanging trees and damp and muddy for the same reason. But I had always known it was the worst bit, and so, in that strange way that superlatives have of negating themselves, I quite enjoyed it. All of me except the knees, of course.

Top: Looking back down the length of Loch Lomond Bottom: Doune, alongside the loch

As we came around one steep rocky decline, we came across some Dutch people lurking about. My initial thought was: 'Um, couldn't you find a pee-pee spot a little more off the path than that?' The thoughts got odder when another Dutch person popped his head around the corner and asked if we had a torch. 'What have you lost?' I enquired. Apparently they had lost a kid goat with a broken leg. They had tried to grab it to take back to Inversnaid Hotel where Animal Rescue would collect it, but it had got scared and rushed off and fallen into a cave. Torch out, kid out, Dutchies on their way out. All was good.

Top: Selfie with Inversnaid hotel in background Bottom Left: Walking the hardest section of the West Highland Way Bottom Right: Dining with friends at the Drover's Inn

When we popped into civilisation at the campsite in Invernarnan, salt and sugar cravings took over and we sat down to ice cream, chips and soft drinks to energise ourselves for the five hundred meter walk to our hotel. The hotel is called the Drover's Inn. It was a place where superlatives had set expectations once again. I had seen reviews that said it was the dirtiest pub in the whole UK. (See how desperate we are to not camp? We booked despite that review!) We were given a room on the third floor (just cruel) called the Hoggs Suite (I dunno?). The Inn was built in 1705. I thought it was delightful. You got lost going around it, and sure, it did have a patina about it, but it had ghosts (possibly of the all the stuffed animals it had about the place, including a shark, a bear, an elusive Haggis, a two-headed sheep and the cutest little bunny head on a plaque that I ever did see). We had a shared bathroom with only a bath, and carpet on the floor (I can never understand a carpeted bathroom, especially when they don't provide a bath mat). It had character, and a definite air of having been around for a while, but I can imagine that some people would see that as dirtiness. We didn't see ghosts, but more mortifiedly, we also didn't see Eurovision. It is the first year in I-don't-know-how-long. Anybody know who won? Anyone with a blow-by-blow of the outfits? I hear there was a bearded woman. Eurovision never disappoints!

Good night to Inverarnan, good night to you.

54.78 kms: Rowardennen-Inversnaid

And here I am at the beginning again. Or the end. The place I finished last time I walked this way. Today was emotional. I threw a wobbly. I think there is an evil spirit in Rowardennen (which is ironic as the name, apparently, is a combination of words that includes an enchanted Scottish flower which wards off evil spirits!). I felt better once I left but I was still conflicted and it required a hissy fit to sort it out. Anyone who has followed along with any of my travels with the boy will know that I always have (at least) one. Maybe I am a spoiled brat. In the past walking has been a game I've played alone. I work well alone. I am able to have my good days and my bad days without getting crippling guilt about who has to witness it all. I can make decisions that affect only one person. I don't have to try and make all the decisions so they suit me and then resent other travelling partners for not making interactive contributions to the decision-making process. Alone means many things, but the biggest is the walking. Today I realised that without the ability to be alone in nature, in your thoughts, physically, the rest of what makes up this type of travelling is the bad stuff. (Ooh, I am being a whiner, aren't I?) I like the feel of pushing yourself physically but not so much that I like to carry that over-laden pack. I like the freedom that having no plan brings until it means sleeping in a field, on cold, hard ground, in the rain. I like the commune with nature, as long as it doesn't include torrential rain, blasting sun, headwinds or midges. But i put up with all those things if it means solitude in its purest form. Suddenly I had a bit of a problem—not quite sure why I didn't see it coming: I'm not alone!

Top Left: National Park graffiti Top Right: Glimpses of the Loch Bottom Left: I can still find him a far behind me with that hat! Bottom Right: Waterall at Inversnaid

I had the perfect plan. We catch a ferry and a train to Glasgow, hire a station-wagon, stop at a camping store and get a cheap blow-up mattress for the back of it, a couple of two-way radios, a second copy of all the maps (and, as a sweetener to V——, a new wrist GPS), stop at a home wears store and get a cheep sheet and doona (instant accommodation), and then every morning I start walking towards a destination with a much lightened pack, V—— drives to the destination, parks the car, gets his own much lightened pack and walks to meet me along the track. We get to spend (a lot of money?) time alone, and time together, we have accommodation if we need it and a way of getting to accommodation if that doesn't seem suitable that night. Brilliant. Except for the fact that V—— hated it. Always has. It's not the first time I've had this idea. It was the first time it had a station wagon, a blow-up mattress and a GPS. My mood hit gravel again. I walked off in front of V—— for an hour and a half. Enough in front that I couldn't really hear him behind me. My mood improved somewhat. His pacing did too. Then I did it again for another hour. Although I was a little worried during that hour that he would fall off a cliff and I wouldn't know. It's a tentative plan for the moment. It doesn't solve all the problems, but it may make it doable. I am sure many of you are reading this and wondering what on earth I am going on about. It's probably not something you will ever understand until you have walked fifteen hundred kilometres on your own and then tried to walk fifty with someone else. It is quite an amazingly privileged problem to have—I recommend it highly.

I do have a much more serious problem though: Historical Romantic Literature! I'm addicted to Kindle's Daily Deal. I do hold back as much as I can but when they offered up Tracey Brogan's Highland Surrender for ninety-nine cents a few days before I left for the highlands, I took it as a sign, and bought it. Now I can't stop reading it. And I am much too much of a literary snob to read historical, or otherwise, romance. It's a disease! Maybe it is my virus-addled brain at work and once the snot moves out I will be able to control myself. Although the denouement will have come and gone and the rivalling clans will be united by the love shown by these betrothed enemies so it will be a mute point anyway. I'm so ashamed. But I have to go read so I'm signing off.

Good night to Inversnaid, good night to you, for tomorrow we tread new roads!

Getting my fix of linky-parties at:

666.2 kms: Rowardennan-Inversnaid.

There really was nothing in between. It would have been cheating to put the names of the few houses in between because they were so remotely away from the track that I couldn't really have said I was there. Oh, maybe Cailness—I got close enough to see their coats hanging up and their windows and doors open. I have no idea how they get there though, because there was also no road. No road, but I was able to get a phone signal?  

The fact that there was no road was the only reason I was technically on the road. I had no other way to get to the bed I had booked at the bunkhouse here in Inversnaid. But if you thought I was a misery yesterday, you should have seen me today. The following was how the conversation with myself went for the first hour and a half stint—on a loop:

 

I feel like I am in a cone of cold-induced misery.

Sorry, to hear that.

And this hill has been going up for an hour. How can that be? There is no where to go up to.

I'm not really sure, sorry again.

And I can't even stop and have a break otherwise I will be eaten by the midges. Don't you know that once one of the female little suckers bite you, it makes a chemical deposit so all it's friends know where to find and eat you. I am a marked woman.

Yeah, I can see the marks there. Maybe you shouldn't scratch them so hard.

(Glare) And I only got three or four hours sleep again. Every time I coughed, I banged my head on the top bunk.

Mmm, poor you.

I know, I'd cry but all the fluids in my body have been redirected to my nose.

Excuse me, I am just going to step off this cliff.

 

The second hour and a half was mostly along the lines of 'oh, maybe the drugs have kicked in, this is okay'.

 

I was going downhill.

 

And then the track turned treacherous and back up the hill, and I started to feel sorry for myself. And moan. And some poor guy stopped and asked me if I was okay. I just said: 'I have the flu'. Sorry dude, I thought you were asking for an honest answer. Although the honest answer would probably have been 'I have a cold': flu sounds more dramatic. Then I had a coughing fit while two elderly people raced past me like I had the plague. When I finally got to Inversnaid there was a grand hotel sitting on the shores of the lake (I had thought there was only the bunkhouse), and a little sign that said 'Bunkhouse—one kilometer up the hill from the hotel'. I was almost prepared to forfeit my payment and ask for a room at the hotel. Then I saw a building that I thought was the bunkhouse and started up the stairs thinking 'must have been hundred meters up the hill'. I was half way up the stairs and realised that the building didn't really look like a refashioned church (see left). I started back down to the road with the realisation that unfortunately I had read the sign right. A woman stopped her car and asked me where I was going. I explained my idiocy and she drove me the kilometer (seemed like more) to the hostel. Her son freaked out when I came in and called him by name.

 

So what to do now? I am sharing the world's smallest four-bunk room with Lisa, from Switzerland, who will be subjected to a night of coughing in exchange for a six am start. She's getting up so early because tomorrow's first seven miles are on a rocky, scrambling path between a rock and a loch. And it is going to start raining at eleven, according to the weather forecast. After five bad sleeping nights, and predicting a sixth, I am not sure a six am start works for me (even though I will hear her rustling her plastic bags then). I am fairly sure a walk along a precipice in the rain doesn't work for me either. My accommodation for tomorrow night is fourteen miles away. I really want to get to seven hundred k's. All these considerations. But I am still tempted to catch the ferry across the loch at the civilised hour of midday, and access the facilities that come with the side of the loch that has a road—buses, trains. Access, not necessarily use. Who am I kidding?

 

Two more things that I have discovered deet can do: if applied to your red-raw-from-blowing nose, it can make you leap about seventeen feet in the air from pain; if applied to your ears in order to keep the midges out of them, it can then ensure that your i-pod earphones become stuck to the inside of your ears, requiring a rather painful bandaid like removal.

 

Let's see what a night can do for this green lurgy in my body.

 

Good night to Inversnaid, good night to you.