The Curse Of Being An Obsessive Planner

From when I first started planning next year’s Big Walk (should I confess that I had a rough route plotted within five days of getting home from Cape Wrath this year?), I said that I was going to take a different approach next time: I wasn’t going to come up with a detailed itinerary.

The intention was that I would, instead, plot the route and do my usual research into the campsites along the way, but that I wouldn’t divvy it up into days, thus leaving us the with flexibility to pick and choose on a day-to-day basis how far we are going to walk (admittedly an itinerary didn’t stop us from doing that, it’s it hasn’t been that uncommon for us to deviate from the plan, but having a stated itinerary does set a certain expectation, which I wanted to get away from).

So, having long ago plotted the route, and having refined and tweaked it here and there over the months, a couple of weeks ago I set about researching campsites (having joined the C&CC so as to find out whether there were any Certified Locations on our route that we could use; I’m now kicking myself that I didn’t join up three years ago). Evenings spent poring over UK Campsite and the C&CC website netted a whole host of waypoints marking campsites along our route, together with an entire spreadsheet of information.

A host of waypoints dotted over the map wasn’t enough though. Next came a bit of colour coding of those waypoints, and more information put into the spreadsheet.

Having done all of that, it struck me that the spacing of the available campsites didn’t give an awful lot of flexibility and so, just out of interest, I had a look at how it is that we’re likely to split the route up. With the days numbered I figured that I may as well have a play around with dates, given that we’ve got a deadline for reaching Ardnamurchan, so next I put days and dates onto the spreadsheet.

Damn! How did that happen? Suddenly I seem to have a day-by-day itinerary!