Scotland from hire car..? 17 11 4 (19) 25 1 30

As with nephew-in-law D lying in his tent during one of the 3 nights we camped out on this last trip I said something to him about my passion and or preoccupation with numbers when he confided "numbers have little interest for me" for I have never been able to deal with them. D is by profession a creative designer and owns his own company which employs something like 60 people at present and he is the creative director of it, therefore relying heavily on others like his Financial Director to handle the company's finances. He went on to say how on the other hand he has the facility to see something in his mind's eye with almost 20/20 vision, by way of saying he can tell what something will look like from simply picturing it in his mind...

This suggests to me D and I must be a pretty good example of opposites for some years ago when building a house extension neither my wife nor I could imagine what something was going to look like until it was built, to the extent that sometimes we decided to have stuff taken down immediately after seeing it erected...As a person rather than seeing stuff before it happens I pride myself in being quite a good observer of phenomenon once it has occurred which has helped me in my career as a development chemist: observing the changes that take place in a reaction for example and then coming up with the scientific reasons to explain the facts...

This preamble then is to reinforce the two themes behind this series of blogs which goes some way to explaining why this year I didn't take sick during my spring visit to UK but instead collected 9 new peaks plus a few climbs more which couldn't be included in the overall tally because we'd had to turn back because of excessively high winds for example, and then for 3 of the new peaks I was accompanied by my wife who for a couple of years hadn't managed to climb any new ones, but only smaller older hills we had climbed before. 

This autumn then I collected a second hire car from the airport and drove directly to the southern Cairngorms to Pitlochry where a number of Munro hills are to hand but only if one is prepared to walk for most of the available light of say 12 hours for the time of year was around the time of the autumn equinox. Next day I arose at 5:30 determined to stay 2 hours ahead of UK summer time to give myself the best chance to collect my first hill which took me of the order of 10½ h setting off at 8:14 to complete it before night fall, fortunately in the best sunny weather of the trip… For this day out I stayed 2 nights in the local youth hostel where with my cold-showering I managed to stay free of sickness, maybe assisted by the fact that not so many other people were staying there, and perhaps because those that were staying were themselves free of sickness too..?

Thereafter I stayed in a couple of places for 3 nights where for the most part I was the only guest, and this was followed up by the 3 nights camping with my nephew-in-law and for the fourth and last night of the trip we stayed in a hotel for another celebratory dinner before retiring to our own rooms.

                           

Because of the contrast between this autumn visit and the last one of 2016 in terms of meeting fewer people because of inclement rainy weather for the most part, it was really only in the youth hostel where I got to interact with new people: a middle aged guy also over from Scandinavia living as he did in the middle of Sweden, and then a Slovenian guy, Museum Manager, who sported a long full dark beard and bald head who, once he had drawn attention to it himself, struck me as rather strange because as he supposed himself looking for all the world like an Islamic terrorist, when not surprising meant his progress through customs points at airports, etc., was always a slow business. And then the fourth person in this hostel group the delightfully young Manageress or Deputy Manager who, appearing to be in her early 20’s still, had managed to see a good bit of the world and had managed on several occasions to live in New Zealand a couple of years at a time…

Otherwise I had very little commerce with other people apart from my nephew-in-law, the couple on my first day out who offered me Yorkshire tea, hailing from the same northern counties of England as I, on the descent from my hill and a young lady Finn I met sitting in the same row of 3 seats with a spare seat in between on the flight over between Stockholm and Edinburgh. Have a good day everyone as I shall leave blogs about my Scottish exploits for some time still to come hopefully..? hahaha