We slept in a little later than we had planned. Even though we were off the WHW about 100 feet, there were no trees, foliage, or block of any kind between us and the trail. Since it was a Monday morning, there was a lot of trail traffic. By the time we got up, cooked, ate breakfast, and packed up, it was 10:30 again before we hit the trail.
We hadn’t been hiking for even a mile yet when we saw a hat in the middle of the trail. It was a nice broad brimmed hat that I immediately coveted. (This turned out to be a very special hat that ended up changing the course of our lives for years to come, but we didn’t know it at the time.) We picked it up with the intention of half-heartedly looking for the owner.
We came to a road crossing and had to do a short road hike. Once we turned back off the road, Pam saw a large hill ahead and asked if that was Ben Nevis (the tallest mountain in Scotland and still almost 90 miles away). I laughed and said no, but being the engineer, I went further and explained that the furthest one can see on a flat horizon is 30 miles. Giving technical, numerical data to a right brain creative person is never a good idea (maybe, some day, I will absorb what I just said). As she was explaining that it could be Ben Nevis and that it might be further than it appears and we can see further since we’re walking down a hill, we walked right past “Ben Nevis” and saw some people stopped and looking around for something. Dam, I had to ask if they lost a hat. Yup, that’s the end of that. We did meet Dan, Peter, and Marcia formerly from UConn and I lost my favorite hat of 15 minutes.
Dan, Peter, and Marcia weren’t carrying full packs like we were so they took off a lot faster down the trail and left us in their dust. A couple miles down the trail we came to the Glengoyne Distillery. This is the furthest south highland distillery (in fact the storage buildings aren’t technically in the highlands since they are on the wrong side of the road). On our way in, we saw our UConn friends heading out. They said the tour was worth it so we decided to go on one. We could either join one in progress or wait 45 minutes until the next one. We chose to join the one in progress. All we had missed was the tasting which they would give us a private tasting afterwards. It was a very informative tour and film. True to their word, they lead us into a private room after the tour was done. They poured our 3 very generous drams each and gave us descriptions and left us to enjoy our shots in privacy. I tried the first one and was swirling it on my tongue when I heard a god awful cough like a cat with a hairball. I stopped drinking and looked around. Pam’s shot was still almost completely full. I tried my second and heard the hack again. I put my shot down and then Pam admitted that she didn’t like Scotch. I ended up with the better part of 5 shots and nice buzz and Pam had 3 hairballs.
We headed on down the trail for a late lunch of burgers and fries at the Beech Tree Inn. It was just a couple miles onto Drymen and then to Drymen Camping Ground. We set up our tent and cooked supper in the open air kitchen at the campground. After supper we took showers.
While we setting up our tent, we saw a couple of high school girls setting up their tent (obviously for the first time since they had the instructions out). As we were heading into the shower, they were mangling a tin can with a Swiss army knife can opener. I asked them if they would like for me to show them how to use it. They agreed. I found out they were a couple of 18 year old Belgium students and they decided at the last minute to hike the WHW. I was very impressed that they would attempt a hike by themselves, and for that matter even hike. Pam’s kids are 19 and 15 and we have a hard enough time getting them to walk to the car let alone walk 100 miles in another country without any real backpacking experience. When we got out of the shower, they still hadn’t figured out how to light their stove so I showed them how.
We had the start of a few blisters on our feet—Pam’s were worse. We tried to put mole skin on them, but didn’t have a good enough pair of scissors to cut it so we thought we’d pick some up in the morning. We took our ibuprofen and valerian root and went to bed at dark feeling refreshed and clean.
