The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Thursday 6 May 2010

Day 44a - Glen Nevis to Fort William

Thursday 6 May
Distance: 2.5 miles (Tot: 757.5 miles*)

I'm not actually counting this as a day of the walk. It's a rest day. However, because tonight we're treating ourselves to a B&B, we did make a whole 2.5 miles forwards progress down the road to Ft William.

With under an hour of walking required, a lie-in was in order, which made it rather annoying that I was wide awake at 5.30! I lay listening to the rain on the tent; rain that I suspect had been falling all night. Rain was okay though, as we didn't have to venture out into it.

A couple of hours later, just as I was thinking about performing the laundry chores, a hint of blue sky appeared. It turned out to be a fine day.

We managed to vacate the campsite just a few minutes before the noon expiry time on our pitch and it wasn't long later that we were in the town having lunch.

"We're doing a lot of walking for a rest day" pointed out Mick as we did several rounds of Fort William on various errands, before eventually settling down into the comfort of our B&B.

Housekeeping has since been performed, trying to book some beds further north so as to break up some long strings of wild camps. It's not been easy, and the end result of what we were able to book means that I'm going to have to forego a meal at the Kylesku Hotel (which is already fully booked for the day we'll be passing), which has been on the schedule from the outset. :-(

Talking of food (it's much on our minds), we'll be setting out with heavy bags in the morning. We are now at the point where we could happily eat a horse and still be hungry, and so with four days worth of food on board (which seems to feature more muesli bars than can be reasonable) we'll be groaning as we don the packs in the morning.

(Karen - I'll check out your blog when we get back into the land of computers and internet access. Hope you had a good time though, and that everything went well.
Robin - it's going equally fast from our point of view! It only seems like a couple of days ago that we crossed the border into Scotland.
Richard - alas, no. I was so busy organising the logistics of the walk that I fell at the last hurdle of organising a postal vote. Wonder if we'll have a phone signal tomorrow to find out the outcome (assuming there's not going to be a clear result by early morning).)

* I've a feeling I might have gone slightly awry with my cumulative mileage calculation somewhere. Never was much good at simple sums! I also looked in a WHW guidebook today, which suggested that yesterday's walk was 21 miles rather than my 19 miles estimate. Didn't feel that long to me, so I'm sticking with the smaller mileage for now.
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1 comment:

  1. I guess you've passed into the Land of No Signal, but here's a quick update. Keswick to Barrow went well, the weather was benign, both myself and Mike Roberts beat our previous best times.

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