Tuesday 15 June to Friday 25 June

June 15&16

Where was Bertie? 15^th On a dead-end section of old road adjacent to the A713 at Green Well of Scotland (not the same dead-end section of old road adjacent to the A713 we’d slept on the night before – that one was at Polharrow Bridge); 16^th: Blair Castle Campsite (£25).

Weather: 15^th: Overcast but largely dry, save for a couple or three relatively short-lived showers. 16^th: wet!

Last week I started writing a blog post about these days, and couldn’t shake the feeling that I was repeating myself. I wrote a bit, deleted it, wrote it again and deleted it again. Finally I remembered the detail of the post I’d already written*. I’ve searched everywhere I can think where I may have put those words, but I seem to have lost them.

In brief: On the Monday we went up a couple of hills. On the Tuesday, a decidedly wet day, we drove from Dumfries and Galloway to Blair Atholl, via diesel and supermarket stops in Perth. Our night at Blair Castle campsite (one of our least favourite campsites ever, yet one to which we keep returning because it’s so conveniently located) can be summarised as spending £25 purely because we fancied long, hot showers (we did also take the opportunity to fill water, but we could have achieved that elsewhere, had we been so minded).

(*That original draft focussed on the fact that we’d left home with a total of 62.5 litres of water on board and that by 16 June we were getting desperate for water and feeling glad we’d economised by not having a single shower in the preceding week. Apparently, the average daily per capita usage of water in the UK is 142 litres.)

June 17- 25

Where was Bertie? He managed to squeeze between the narrow gateposts, avoid the satellite dish, and didn’t quite manage to duck under some trees, to access the parking area at Newtonmore Hostel.

Weather: Mainly forecast good, then materialising disappointingly wet. Ridiculously cool for the time of year. One night got down to 3 degrees, and even daytime temperatures were more early spring that summer.

Thursday was the day we were scheduled to travel to Newtonmore, but I managed to convince Mick that, rather than trying to get our money’s worth by staying on Blair Atholl campsite until noon, we should leave early and visit a round of four hills on our way (quite literally on our way; they required no detour at all from the A9). It was a fine day in very decent weather.

The next eight days fundamentally looked like this:

This year, TGO Challenge Control spent its first week in Newtonmore, in the hostel, which gave a the massive benefit of being three steps away from a very well equipped kitchen, allowing us to self-cater whilst still manning the phones. Having Bertie a dozen paces away outside also worked out well*.

With the Challenge being a much smaller event this year, there was leeway for one of us at a time to take time off. I thus managed to fit in a 50km run on the Sunday morning. I chose Sunday based on the forecast; in reality the cloud was low and failing to hold onto its moisture. Fortunately, it didn't start raining in earnest until about ten or fifteen minutes before I finished my outing. I found it incredible that after that I was still in a fit state to string sentences together, answer phones and do my duties until gone 9pm. 

(*TGO Challenge Control is usually located at the Park Hotel in Montrose for the full two weeks of the event. On the face of it, Bertie is also conveniently located there, in the car park, but I concluded over the course of last week that the big difference isn’t the need to go up and down stairs and through reception to access him from the Control room at the hotel, but the fact that every time we need to nip into him for something, we have to unset/set his alarm and undo two sets of locks, whereas in Newtonmore we could comfortably leave him unlocked as: 1) he was within our sight; 2) he was tucked away from the road behind a house; and 3) there was no way someone could nick off with him at speed (note my comments about tight gate posts and trees!) or without us noticing.)

Loch Gynack during a calm period

At the point that I squeezed between these cows I was unaware that they'd nearly killed someone last year.