First steps!

Hey dudes! So even though I haven’t yet posted pictures from our days in Edinburgh, I wanted to skip ahead so I could let everyone (my mom) know what we’re up to as we’re up to it. So this is from earlier today, and then hopefully some time in the future I will get around to posting photos from Edinburgh, because Edinburgh is great!

So we left our hotel in Drymen this morning around 8:30. It was probably later than that, though, because I ten dot run late, and I was definitely the last person to show up outside. And then we started walking.

And we walked. We basically left the city and walked north, slowly approaching a giant hill which just got bigger and bigger. Optics. Eventually we were walking up that hill, and eventually we even got to the top of it. The weather was pretty great, with a light breeze and just enough cloud cover to keep us cool and bug-free. Being the first day, everyone was in pretty good shape and well rested, but also still in that early-hike mindset where you think it should only take you 5 minutes to walk a mile. So we’d look at the map every so often, and we were never as far along as we’d like, but it was awesome.

Around 12;30, after 7,8 miles and four hours of hiking (impressive pace, no?), we stopped for lunch. This is where things got pretty dark for me. With my vegetarian sandwich (basically a hot caprese) came some potato chips. I tasted them, and they tasted funny, so I asked a fellow hiker to try them and confirm they tasted like bacon. This was confirmed, but then the group quickly convinced me that there’s never any bacon in bacon-flavored stuff. So I ate them all, and was pretty well creeped out by it. Then, after I ate them (cause I’m a moron), I went to check the ingredients on the chips. When I found the bag, it bragged in giant letters how it was made with REAL ACTUAL LOCAL ORGANIC PORK! Fuck. So much for my veg-edge. But also not really a big deal. Still made me sad.

That’s where we came from.

The afternoon walk was equally beautiful, though it didn’t have any of the awesome vistas of the morning, it was still nice. Loch Lomond, next to which we spent most of the morning walking, is beautiful, and warm enough to swim in. See the pictures below for evidence! Unfortunately, as the day went on, our estimates of how far we’d gone were inflated just as our actual pace slowed, so it seemed like we’d walked a thousand miles every time we moved forward ten steps. So that was frustrating, but eventually we got to our goal (Rowardennan!), where we got a beer.

Here’s the annoying part. (IT wasn’t a surprise, but it’s still annoying.) There weren’t enough hotel rooms in the town we’d walked to, so we had to stay in a different town. Not that big of a deal, except the place we were actually staying in was in the opposite direction from where we wanted to go. Also not that big of a deal, but it happened to be that we were staying at the exact same place we had lunch. So, after lunch and after 8 miles of up and down hiking, we got into a cab which took us to our hotel, exactly 8 miles back up the trail.

That’s where I am now, in the hotel bar, typing and drinking Auchentoshan, which is delicious, FYI. We just had a great dinner, especially teh part where my dad ordered dessert first, as is his style. He shared, and I sat next to him, so basically I won! Way to go, Brett! But I walked, in total, about 16 miles today, so I’m ready to go to bed. Photos and dumb captions, as ever, are below.