Scotland: Fall 1997
Glencoe
After a windy and stormy night when I thought the tent would fall down on me with every single gust of wind, we decided that even though it looked like rain and wind the rest of the day, we'd at least try one of the short walks in the forest from the National Trust station where the nice man had told us about the different trails. This is us at Signal Rock, which is where the fire was built that sent the signal for the massacre of the MacDonald clan at Glencoe...
...and this is the view from Signal Rock...very nice, even through the mist...
As we got back to the forestry station where we had started our little walk, the weather started cheering up enough to take this beautiful picture. Don't you want to go to Glencoe now?
We weren't sure if we completely understood what the nice man had told us about how to get to the starting point, but the one of the hikes he described sounded really nice, since it went past a waterfall and ended up in a hidden, hanging valley up in the mountains. We think we found the right one, since here's Marcus about halfway up the waterfall...
...and here's me posing on the rock by the other side of the same spot...
We kept going up following the waterfall, since we saw other people coming down, including soldiers we assumed were on training exercises...and we finally came up over a ridge and saw this beautiful sight. We assumed this was the secret valley the nice man had described, or at least if it wasn't the same one he was telling us about, it was nice enough for us!
I tried to make my own panoramic picture by taking two pictures, but it was so windy that the clouds had moved by the time I took the next picture! This is the view just past the trees from our campsite. Pretty nice, huh?
Here you can see our campsite in context, since that large mountain behind is the same one that's on the left of the previous picture. That's Marcus next to the tent waving his hand in front of his face...Good one, Marcus!
Since we had dry wood, I decided to use my pocketknife to whittle some kindling and see how good a Girl Scout I was. My goal was to build the fire so that I could start it with one match, but it was so windy I couldn't get my match to the wood before it blew out! I had to resort to one squirt of lighter fluid, but it kept burning exactly as it should have once it finally got started. I was proud, so I took a picture to immortalize it...
As you can see, since our wood was dried out by now, we kept the fire going very well for cooking and warmth while we spent our evening. The only problem was Marcus cutting off his head in the picture, but I kept him in since you can see he was smiling with his teeth showing...!
Yet another appropriate meal? We didn't only have soup, you know...We had pigs-in-blankets (hot dogs on sticks with bread dough wrapped around them), potatoes, bacon, eggs, sausages...all those good, healthy things you eat while camping...!
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