North West Scottish Highlands
We had a very lazy and uneventful day on Sunday. We woke up to rain and mist, and when I ventured outside the van I was greeted by a storm of midges. There had been too many midges for our liking the previous evening, many of which had got into the van, so we packed up and drove off in a huff to a nice spot by the sea to have breakfast.
We'd been planning an overnighter bivvying on the hill on Monday night, but were both feeling rather pessimistic due to the rain and low clouds, the recent midgestorm, and the weather forecast of possible spells of heavy rain and thunderstorms!
By the time we'd driven round to the hills we'd been thinking of climbing the clouds hadn't risen and we'd decided against the bivvy. We popped in to use the public toilets in Torridon, to find to our excitement that there was also a public shower in there! Public showers are few and far between in the UK (we've only ever come across one before, and that was in Dartmouth). This little find, plus all the driving we've been doing has enabled us to delay stopping on a campsite for at least a couple of days, as we are clean and George's battery is still fully charged.
We ended up doing nothing at all for the remainder of the day except driving further north to Assynt which is probably our favourite part of mainland Scotland. The hills are smaller there and we hoped they'd be below the cloud. We spent the night in a quiet spot overlooking the Summer Isles, which was lovely and pretty much midge free, but only gets 8/10 as it was sloping a bit causing the wine glasses to slide across the table and me to get crushed by Claire in the night.
This morning we woke up to low cloud again. I suggested a 6 mile lower level walk to Eas a Chual Aluinn - Britain's highest waterfall, which neither of had ever heard of. During the journey, Claire suggested running it instead of walking, which I foolishly agreed to as we are supposed to be in training for a half marathon. Neither of us paid much attention to the map, assuming that "low level" meant "fairly flat", and I was expecting to be back well within a couple of hours, even after admiring the waterfall for a while.
It was actually 7 miles and took us 2.5 hours, and that doesn't include admiring the waterfall (which didn't look that high really). There turned out to be quite a lot of hills on route (the low level type of hill) and the ground was rough and difficult to run on. We both felt quite pleased with ourselves when we got back though, but it has been agreed that I'm choosing the next running route.
We've found a nice little spot overlooking Loch Assynt to spend the night. It's level, seems pretty midge free and has lovely views across the loch. The cloud has finally lifted from most of the hills and we're hoping it will stay that way for tomorrow.
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