Blogs from Perthshire, Scotland, United Kingdom, Europe

Saturday 9 July 2022, Day 6 on the West Highland Way (WHW) Crainlarish to Tyndrum. 7.14 miles by Garmin, 1253 elevation gain by All Trails, 3 hours 30 minutes walking. Today one device or the other went to sleep on me so all numbers are highly suspect but within the ballpark of the distance in the booklet for this leg. Our group is in two different places that are side by side in Crainlarish. This is more of a town. The night before there was a lot of discussion about taking the taxi to the Ewich House, where the WHW meets the A82 highway about 2.5 miles along the walk. I look at my All Trails navigation app and determine this is more than 1/3 of the distance for the day. I decide that I will ... read more

After the first part of the A to Z of Perthshire which was a nice circular run starting and finishing in Aberfeldy , it was time for something a bit more problematic. The run itself was reasonably straight forward. Lots of trail and over two race routes I had ran previously . My anxiety revolved around getting to the start and then returning to the car afterward.Achievement one – I arrived at Ballanluig a good fifteen minutes before the bus to Aberfeldy was due to depart – I toasted the lack of traffic action at regular trouble spots Hermison Gait , The Queensferry Crossing and The Broxten Roundabout with a cup of tea in a café as I waited for the bus. The bus dropped me where I had stopped the previous week and just to ... read more

I really must buy some new maps. Not that there was a geographical issue with the 1984 version of OS sheet 43 Braemar to Blair Atholl. It is always the memories that floor me. Using maps from a by gone age take me back to my days as a race snake in the mid eighties where distance and height was no object for a day out. Sheet 43 has a number of good days on it. These included a trot over my favourite munros Ben a Ghlo and Cairn Laith. Also there was a great long day leaving Aviemore around 09:30 and making Blair Atholl for a leisurely pint before boarding the 17:40 train – causing much amusement in the Greenmantle pub after Tuesday intervals when I explained my absence later that evening. 35 years later, ... read more

Autumn clock change and the onset of early darkness is a bit of a challenge for every runner and a sure sign that the depths of winter are approaching. The transition from long summer days in simmet and shorts to wrapped up running through the winter gloom is continually a difficult adaptation. Im lucky – shift work and more days off by doing longer working hours allows me the opportunity to almost always run in daylight. Its just that “daylight” in November and December can be very grey. Every good day for the rest of the year is a bonus and after some challenging weather last week, I was lucky to eek out the brightest of autumn days as I collected more letters on the Perhshire A to Z. Again, I was mostly retracing my steps ... read more

To those who are thinking ‘when is she going to write anything’, we had a little difficulty leaving Aus ha ha. Everything was going smoothly until our departure time of 10:15pm to Doha passed by in Adelaide Airport and the ‘Delayed’ was still marked against our flight. At 11:45, two hundred passengers heard the words we all were dreading: “the flight has been cancelled”. Long story short, we flew out of Melbourne Airport (yes, Melbourne) the following night at 7:05pm to Doha. And if anyone is ever in that situation, I can highly recommend Qatar’s choice of Peppers for accommodation in Adelaide although flying with Qatar again might require more consideration. We hired a car at Edinburgh Airport. We had booked a car “something like a Ford Focus” and were given an almost new Audi. Thank ... read more