M&G's Blog: Thursday 15 to Tuesday 20 October

Thursday 15th

Where was Bertie? A night at Faskally Holiday Park at a cost of £33 including electricity

I'd intended to do a TGOC East recce on our way down to Faskally, but Mick was still rather poorly, with a high fever as well as general cold symptoms so we didn't get an early start and I deferred the recce by a day, even though it would require a minor backtrack.

A stop for a few essentials in Newtonmore, then a killing-time pause at House of Bruar for 15 minutes, and we arrived at the holiday park 2 minutes after the earliest arrival time.

We soon had Bertie plugged in and then suddenly it was teatime. I have absolutely no idea what happened to the intervening hours, but they certainly weren't spent doing any of the chores I'd intended to do upon arrival at the campsite!

Friday 16th

Where was Bertie? He spent another night in the little car park alongside the A924, about 5 miles east of Pitlochry.

The quandary with the recce I needed to do (in Glen Girnaig), was that in order to be sure of a space in the Killiecrankie Visitor Centre car park, we would need to get there early, but if we arrived early we would be foregoing hours of included electricity at the campsite, and that seemed a shame as we'd paid for it.

Then it occurred to me that Killiecrankie really is only a couple of miles along the road from Faskally campsite, I had a bike at my disposal, and if I was on the bike, I could ride the first part of the recce route too. I reckoned that if I could be out the door at 8am, I'd be back in time to have a shower, before we had to vacate our pitch at noon.

The 8am start wasn't quite achieved, but I was on my way at twenty past. The ride in was hard, mainly because of how much uphill was involved and the gradients, but also as I was now sickening with the lurgi that I thought I'd dodged when my couple of days of feeling off colour earlier in the week didn't amount to anything.

The outing was a circuit in glorious surroundings, but it was also somewhat nugatory. One of my missions was to find a way to bypass a wooden walkway that had been in a dangerous state when I used it last year. I achieved that, but I also chatted to the workmen who are in the process of replacing the walkway, and established that no bypass will be needed by next May. I then needed to check out another path, but soon found a locked and unclimbable gate in a deer fence - not a problem for me (I scaled the fence), but it makes the route unsuitable for TGOC East purposes. I continued along the route 95% sure that there was now no value in the rest of my recce, but again, the surroundings were lovely and if it wasn't for the raging sore throat and the time pressure of wanting to be back on the campsite in time for a shower, I wouldn't have even thought twice about the merit of continuing.

Thanks to a very easy return bike ride, I was back at the campsite before 11.30 and achieved uncommon efficiency in getting showered whilst Mick stowed the bike. We left our pitch with a whole 9 minutes to spare. (Mick had tried to extend our stay whilst I'd been out, but they'd not had any cancellations, and there was not a pitch to be had.)

A pitstop in Pitlochry (mega busy - it's 'Enchanted Forest' time of year) for some more supplies, then it wasn't far to our overnight spot, where we frittered the rest of the afternoon away.

Saturday 17th

Where was Bertie? At Glenshee Ski Centre, where a pitch with electric hook up costs £15, but if you want water or waste it's another £5 for each extra service you want.

I think we may have to stop using the park up on the A924. One year to the day since I woke up in that layby feeling very unwell, I woke up in that layby feeling rather unwell, although this time with whatever cold-like lurgi Mick & Ali have been suffering, rather than a stomach bug. That meant that for the second year in a row, I wasn't going to be doing the Glen Fearnach recce that I'd had on the agenda.

The crying shame about this was that we were now entering a three day weather window of spectacular blue skies, and frosty nights, and given my complete lack of energy, it looked very much like we were going to be sitting them out. The forecast after that involved a rain symbol every day for the next two weeks.

Really not the best start to the trip, but there was nothing to be done, other than to book a pitch up at Glenshee, so that we could get some power into Bertie's battery, and do a lot of sitting around.

Sunday 18th to Tuesday 20th

Where's Bertie? He's at Braemar Caravan Park at a cost of £30 per night, plus electricity at 31p/kwh (we used £1.82 on our first night)

I'm pleased to say that I woke up on Sunday morning feeling massively better. The sore throat was still persisting, but my short-lived sore lungs and face-ache had resolved. I was optimistic that I would be able to take advantage of Monday's good weather, even if Sunday was going to be another day of largely sitting around. A cafe visit was off the agenda (not wanting to spread germs), and with such good weather and it being a Sunday in school holidays, we weren't confident that we would be able to park in Braemar if we got down there early. So, we hung around at Glenshee until 1pm, then drove down to Braemar campsite.

We did actually manage a recce on Sunday, but it was less than a kilometre long, starting from the campsite, so it didn't overly tax us. We even tagged a gentle stroll through the village onto the end of it.

I then spent most of the rest of the afternoon doing laundry. Early in the trip to need to do laundry, but with Mick's persisting fever (read: extreme nighttime sweating), and not knowing when we may next find ourselves with laundry machines at our disposal, it would have been negligent to have passed by the opportunity.

We checked out of the campsite at 9 on Monday morning, although with the comment that we would likely be back in a couple of days. Out to Linn of Dee we drove, where I walked a 15km circuit up the glen, going out at a good pace on the track that runs up the N side of the Dee to the Geldie Burn/Bynack Burn confluence, then back at a much slower pace on the pathless terrain on the S side of the water. It felt like an odd thing to do on a day when water levels were so low that I could have forded at any point, to reach that perfectly good track on the other side. However, that wouldn't have served the purpose of the recce, so I did as I had been asked.

I fear that my photos don't do justice to how spectacular this outing was.

We'd intended to spend the night at Linn of Dee, so that I could visit a Corbett on Tuesday morning, but the forecast was such a story of heavy rain and high winds for the morrow that a hill looked unlikely. There seemed little point in spending the night at Linn of Dee for any other reason, mainly because it's so cold in that car park. It doesn't get much sun, and as Mick sat in Bertie wearing hat and jacket and hiding under a blanket, he was surprised to see me return in my shirt sleeves and exclaimed as to how I wasn't freezing*. The answer was that about 200m away from the car park, it was actually quite warm in the sunshine, but I could feel the temperature dropping as I crossed the road on the final approach to Bertie). We thus decided to return to Braemar campsite and spend another couple of nights plugged into the mains. (*When I'd set out at gone 1030, it had been -3 degrees in that car park, and as I headed up the glen I wondered whether I'd accidentally left my toes behind as for all I could perceive they were absent from my feet. It was only when I got out into the sunshine that I finally started to warm up.)

That brings us to today, and in common with the same day last year, I feel like I've been conned by the weather forecasters. That 95% chance of heavy rain all day has materialised to be many hours of mizzly rain and quite a few dry hours. I took myself out to walk a short low-level from the campsite, and there was no notable wind either, making me think that I could have made it up my hill, even if I wouldn't have had any visibility and would have returned with a filthy bike.

Instead, we've been to the Bothy cafe, where I accidentally over-ordered toast (when asked 'do you want one round or two' I understood the question to be one slice of bread or two, but it turned out to be 'one serving of two slices or two servings'), and Mick has got on with some work that he's been meaning to do for days whilst I've tapped out these blog posts - so all in all, a productive day.

Hopefully, after a rather disappointing start to the trip, we are now back in good health and it's now only going to be the weather that mars our fun!

Photos all from Monday, in reverse order: