A few of us are planning a long weekend in September to do a bit of the West Highland Way, and we thought we needed to get some practice in beforehand as we are complete rookies, so, yesterday was our first outing. It had originally been intended that we do Clach-na-Ben, but we thought that might be unwise due to the soft lying snow - ok - let's do a simple one instead - from Potarch back to Banchory.
We caught the bus - CK and I using our free passes, but the others having to pay - down to Potarch where Dave met us and shuttled us up to his house for some warming soup, bread and cheese. Dave had just returned from South Africa, where, bizarrely, he had acquired 2 Fifty Trillion Dollar notes issued by the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe - for the princely sum of £2!
We set off bang on noon, but decided to take a team photo first of all:
OK - failed - no heads. Try again:
Whoops - Dave missing this time - ok - give up.
The more observant of you will have noticed that we had a pro in our midst - Ken had been kind enough to bring along sets of poles for us to try out. We walked uphill from Chapel House to Shooting Greens then headed through the woods with the initial intention of looping round and up Scolty Hill on our way back to Banchory.
As we climbed, the snow got deeper and deeper and nobody had been out in front of us to lay the trail, so it was real hard work lifting boots up and out - and, of course, our feet were wet through eventually. We had to stop a few times - ostensibly for photo opportunities, but more realistically to give the cardio systems, limbs and lungs a rest. Here's one of these (over-exposed) snaps:
We had to give up our plan to traverse Scolty and detoured back down towards the river, where there were obstacles along the way - but they didn't disturb Sharpy's phone call:
Once we had decided we were back down to more sensible walking conditions, John produced the very welcome Glenfiddich:
It was a pretty hard starter - even Ken thought the conditions were tough. We retired to the Douglas for some welcome pints of Flanker's Tackle - excellent - and planned for our next training walk - hopefully in drier underfoot conditions up Clach-na-Ben on Sunday 18th April - all welcome to join us.
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