DAY 8 - SLOW BOAT TO GARTEN!

INVERNESS TO BOAT OF GARTEN

I really must stay that we had the most delightful hostess Christine at our Strathallan B & B who absolutely couldn’t do enough for us! After a lovely breakfast, we nipped into Inverness to pick up some extra plasters and T-shirts and by the time we had hobbled back, Christine had the taxi waiting for us to get us to the beginning of our day’s walk which allowed us to miss all the Inverness streets & the beginning of the horrid A9.

As we got out of the taxi, the skies continued to cloud over and a few miles into the walk, the drizzle commenced followed by the pouring rain. In spite of our good start (in the taxi!), we really began to flag up the hills and our pace just got slower and slower. Anita’s pack wouldn’t sit comfortably and both our feet were still causing problems. We listened back to our BBC Radio 2 performance which went out today at 11.30am and hoped we didn’t disappoint anyone with our performance!! Anyway, it made us laugh, walking along the lanes in the Highlands, sharing the headphones in the teeming rain!!!

After a short rest stop at 6 miles, in a disused bus shelter, munching on an apple and an oatcake, we agreed to rejoin the A9 and see if we could get a lift to a lane a bit further down the road as we still had a long, long way to go….. We stood just near a lay-by and after sticking out a thumb for 15 minutes in the absolute pouring rain, Anita managed to chat up a Highways worker in a large white van, Ian, who was kind enough to take us right to the front door of our next B & B – The Boat House in Boat of Garten.

Our room was nice and again we were blessed with a lovely hostess and her cutie daughter Mena, baby rabbit and Poppy the dog! Anita and I have a lovely double bed tonight but having been camping buddies in Nepal, I think we will manage this challenge! (As we are both hardly able to move once we stop, I am sure we won’t be bumping into each other much in the night!!)

After lovely hot showers and hair wash, we wandered down to the local Boat Hotel, and ordered some fabulous hot bar food & wine and sat next to the crackling log fire for the next 3 hours watching the original steam engines go by!!!! Whilst snuggled on our big leather sofa, we idly chatted to a lovely couple SAlly & Dave from Dundee who were away for a night off from their 2 year old - in amongst the conversation they very kindly offered to take our bags on tomorrow to Tomintoul!!! How could we be so lucky to find another wonderful offering!! We celebrated with a 3rd (or was it 4th?!) wine and by that time needed to stagger up the lane again to get back for an ‘early night’!

On our return we got speaking to Harry our host here about our route tomorrow, and he thinks we might be overly ambitious thinking we can make it to our next B & B in one day even without our packs on!! We said we would sleep on it over night and assess the feet situation in the morning but if the weather is still terrible and our feet no better, then we may take him up in his offer to drive us to Tomintoul and then for us to do a circular walk around the local trails….. lets see what magic sleep can do ........