Another Long Walk: Day 5: Women in Skirts

Karolina wakes up in the morning, wrapped in her
emergency blanket to help stay warm.

Sept 12: Karolina and I woke up to a fairly thick fog again this morning, which was a little disappointing since it would limit views.

I know all of you men reading my last blog post were probably disappointed seeing me in a skirt. But I'll make it up to you today because upon waking up in the morning, Karolina told me that she'd like to try wearing the skirt-that-kind-of-looks-like-a-kilt-if-you-squint-real-hard during the day. Not first thing in the morning, though. The mornings are nippy and she wanted temperatures to warm before exposing her legs to the Great Outdoors. So she hiked for about an hour before she decided it was time for The Skirt.

But it means that today, you can see her legs instead of mine. =) The ladies reading this blog might find the switch a bit disappointing, though!

The skirt had fit me pretty well, but Karolina's a skinny little thing and the skirt was far too large for her skinny frame and kept wanting to fall down. She'd literally have to grab the skirt and hold them up to prevent them from falling down to her ankles, and it made me laugh every time I saw it. I'd forget about her "skirt problem," and then turn around and see her holding them up and just start laughing. It never got old! When she hiked, it wasn't as much of a problem because the strap of her backpack around her waist would hold up the skirt, but as soon as she stopped and took off her pack, the skirt would want to fall down again.

I figured she'd stop after an hour or two of this, but surprisingly, she lived with it for the entire day!

As for the day's hiking, it was largely uneventful. The trail mostly followed old military roads built in the 1700s that were easy to walk on and provided large, expansive views once the fog burned off. We stopped in Tyndrum to resupply buying lots of food to last for the next two days until the next real grocery store. We stopped at a small restaurant to eat lunch and pig out (Karolina's new favorite English idiom was "pigging out" and she kept working that into every conversation that she could!). The main reason we stopped for lunch at the snack bar and didn't eat on the trail was because her camera's batteries were dying and needed to be recharged, so we plugged her camera into an outlet while we ate, shopped and wrote more postcards. My camera didn't need charging--I deliberately use a camera that requires batteries to avoid that sort of thing.

The fog in the morning was terrible!

Back on the trail, we walked through sheep pastures and classic Highlands terrain which had some of my favorite views of the trail so far. The sheep were really quite stupid and we pondered how they ever managed to survive in the wild before being domesticated. In most of my hiking, cattle are common, but I haven't seen many sheep. In Scotland, sheep far outnumber the cattle!

But they were so stupid! They had a clear fear of us and would run away from us down the trail, but they'd follow the same trail we were on and as soon as we got close again, they'd run down the trail further. At this rate, we'd be chasing them all the way into Fort William!

At one point, a fence kept them trapped within a very narrow corridor along the trail where they really couldn't go anywhere except down the trail, but when they came to an intersection in the road and could turn off and away from us, they kept going forward down the trail. "Turn left!" I told the sheep but they didn't listen.

Then, a bicyclist started coming from the other direction, and the sheep were trapped in that narrow corridor between us and the bicyclist and I wondered what the sheep would do now. What they did do... they stampeded! They pushed themselves to the edge of the corridor and started running with terror away from us, jumping over each other in terror (every sheep for himself!) into a giant puddle of mud where they'd sink up to their chests and scramble frantically to extract themselves. I felt a little bad for the sheep. We weren't trying to terrify them, but they were acting like we were wolves about to devour them. However, their stampede through the mud bog was actually kind of funny just because it was so utterly inept.

The bicyclist in the other direction breezed by quickly and the sheep calmed down considerably now that they were no longer trapped by people on both sides, and eventually we managed to get around them as they hugged the edge of the corridor finally putting those sheep behind us.

Late in the afternoon, we set up camp on a hillside overlooking the small town of Inveroran. Calling it a town is something of a misnomer, though. More like the two buildings of Inveroran. For the first time, we had to deal with mosquitoes which I found much more annoying than the midges since I couldn't get their persistent "Bzzzz! Bzzz!" out of my ears. Karolina, while we were in Tyndrum, purchased a headnet and put it to good use. Weather forecasts for the rest of the week included absolutely no rain so she decided not to try fixing her tent in town but rather wait until she got home. The headnet would do her fine in the meantime.

Once Karolina warmed up, she put on the skirt and started
showing some legs!

The condensation in the morning lit up cobwebs in the fields like floodlights!

Former West Highland Way thru-hikers who didn't quite make it to the end.... I'm totally making that up. In truth, these graves date back to the early Celtic church in the 8th century.

According to signs on the trail, the sheep with black faces are Scottish blackfaces. Not very creative as far as naming sheep go....

A bird on the table is better than two on the head! =)

I'd have never known we passed the site of the epic Battle of Dalrigh. Never heard of it? Neither had I! If you really want to read more about it, though, I'll just point you to Wikipedia since I know absolutely nothing about this battle!

Karolina tries to pick up the "lost sword." Once again, I had never heard about the Loch of the Legend of the Lost Sword, but I found this blog post which seems to describe the story well.

The trail took this photo of Karolina hiking!


A plaque describes this area: Look around you; the area of bare, grey ground is the site of a lead crushing plant. Although it has been closed for many years, very little has grown on the poisoned waste ore. There were not the same concerns then about the effects on the countryside as there are today.

I rinse my socks in the creek. I didn't use soap, though. I figure the dirt on my feet is all natural and doesn't "really" pollute creek water. So it's just a sock rinse, not a sock wash!

Karolina fords a ferocious river just before Tyndrum!

Most of our resupplying took place at this grocery store in Tyndrum.

This was an outfitters, and we stopped for lunch at a snack bar behind it.

On our way out of Tyndrum, we found this starting line. I'm not sure what it's the starting line for, but I had Karolina pretend like she was about to start a race! With a giant backpack on! =)

The sign on this gate reads: Please Close Gate. Which I think is hilariously funny since it's a stand-alone gate without fences on either side of it. Why does it need to be kept closed?! Why is there even a gate?! =) (Yeah, I know, it probably was attached to a fence at some point in the past, but no more!)