A message from 4406ft

This message was recorded on the summit of Ben Nevis using my camera phone. It is fairly awful - my voice sounds dreadful and the camera work is of the lowest quality. I think Vikki looks pretty good in her pink hat though.



Vikki, Amy, Dave and I went up Nevis on the Wednesday. We kept it simple and went up the Tourist Route, starting from the Visitor Centre at 9am so we could get an update on the weather forecast; bit of cloud, chance of some showers, close to freezing near the top. It turned out to be fairly warm and sunny for much of the climb, with the clouds nearer the top giving us brief glimpses of the views, and making it cool but not really cold. Our trek back down was fairly slow thanks to some sore legs and, sadly, Vikki didn't see anywhere she felt was going to be private enough to try the SheWee, so the Ben Nevis Inn at the base of the mountain was a very welcome sight - a chance to relieve bladders and slake thirsts before heading back to Fort William for a barbecue.

In case you're wondering, the boys spent the day with their grandparents at the beach. I'd like to include some photos from their day out but I think they're still on Andy's phone. The best of my photos are here:

Cow Hill-abunga, Dudes

In the afternoon after we got to Fort William I decided to leave everyone else to get on with cooking tea and go for a run as part of my training for the Aviemore Half Marathon (despite my good intentions, this turned out to be the last run I managed to do for a whole week which is a bit of a set back but shouldn't be a major problem). I decided to follow the track up Cow Hill which sits between the town and Ben/Glen Nevis. It's a tough wee hill for a run but it felt good after being stuck in the car for so long.
The next day, we decided to all go up to the top and see the views which were pretty good although partially obscured by low cloud. Unfortunately, it was a last minute sort of thing and we didn't take any bribes for the kids, so they moaned a lot - even lots of splashy puddles didn't cheer them up that much.
Anyway, here are the photos - some of them are from my run and some from the walk. The smaller ones are from my phone so the quality's a bit iffy.

Another Holiday In The Highlands

Fear not - this blog has not been hit by a general malaise and neither have its authors been abducted by aliens. In fact, we've been away gathering new material for the blog or, in other words, having a holiday. For the last two years we've stayed in Scotland and been relatively lucky with the weather. Last week we were in Fort William (at this house which is here) and our luck ran out; it rained every day except two and was generally dreich for most of the time. We still had a lot of fun and took full advantage of the few spells of nice weather. I'll add more details and photos later but for now please enjoy the views from Dalaraban House:

The picture above is our view of Ben Nevis, the highest mountain in Scotland. Most of the time, it was shrouded in (or completely obscured by) cloud so this was a rare glimpse of the summit.

This autostitch panorama shows the view looking over Loch Linnhe. The hill on the left is Meall an t-Slamain. The towns of Corpach and Caol occupy the centre and Cow Hill is the one on the far right with the communications mast.