Home again 15 6 20 (11) 25 1 20
At least that is how my long vacation appeared at
times this year, that is the latest visit to UK between 15 5 2 and 15 5 8
in England visiting relatives and then in Scotland where I have been engaged a
good part of my life climbing her 282 Munro hills...
This year then between 15 5 8 and 15 6 17, with my
wife accompanying me until 15 5 20 when she left for me to continue climbing some of the more isolated Munros which for her too have occupied a good deal of
time in years gone by before her heart began to tell her scaling hills wasn't
the best form of exercise, if the sense of dedication I began to feel
increasingly after scaling the first 20+ hills was always absent in her case,
her long-term saying about this shared activity always used to being that “They
are all the same!”, hahaha... Instead she chose for the second part of her
walking-holiday to journey to northern Spain with a girl-friend to begin the
Camino de Santiago, or the Santiago de Compostela’s pilgrims route, a more
manageable low-level route.
What introduced the concept of likening the
activity for me to that of being in a war zone was the appalling weather this
May compared to the previous two Mays in the first instance, until all
comparisons to being in Scotland at any time paled to a level of insignificance
compared to May/June 2015. The weather then as a major factor but the scale of
the undertaking on my part since, in former times we had chosen the shorter
walks more readily available from convenient car-parking sites close to the
generally only day-long walks: now walks requiring increasingly longer walks-in
to the foot of the hills before starting the ascents proper, occasionally
requiring first a day's walk-in then a camp before beginning the climb early
next day, with a third day of walk-out at the walk's completion... and in the
absence of my wife at my side an absence of hire-car in favour of pulling my
main rucksack on a pair of shopping trolley wheels, with my day-pack on my back
and in my free hand a plastic shopping bag provided with my latest food shopping
for sustenance.
And the last factor but by no means of least
importance the fact that one can no longer lay claims to being a young(er) man whilst
to admit to being an old(er) man is only something one has recently begun to
come to terms with…
So a third May in a row for a visit stretching
almost to mid-summer when in the last two years one had 102 hills left to
climb, 78 left after 2014 and 59 left at the beginning of 2015. And
how many peaks still left after my forays into the wet and windy hills of
2015..?
today's pic: 1) Scotland's most commonon bird above 2500 feet (762 metres), the Ptarmigan;
2) the first of many rainbows after high winds and rain and maybe a little sleet on our first day out on Driesh;
and 3) one of the two meals for £8:90 at one of Witherspoons Scottish restaurants, yummy!
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