The Magnificent Seven

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We were up early this morning and having breakfast at 7am - poor Nikki, she doesn't do early mornings! The men had shopped for our packed lunches the night before so we were all set for the day ahead. Clive had plenty of snacks and chocolate bars (£27 worth!!), but that's another story.

We were all a little anxious about today as 20 miles was a long way, but actually compared to other days, the terrain was very good to us, the weather wasn;t too bad - just a few showers and we kept pretty good time. We made sure we stopped every two hours for a break, which was greatly appreciated. The scenery again today was superb and you could you walking for hours without seeing any sign of civilisation, right out in the wilderness. We saw lots of waterfalls, which were spectacular, we used some of the water to boil up for a cuppa, so it saved our fresh reserves for drinking water when needed.

It really was a great idea to use the bag service as it would have been a long slog with them on our backs today.

We stopped for our lunch under some pine trees by the side of a running stream which was beautiful until the skies decided to open above us, but as we were all in our waterproofs, we stayed there and ate our lunch. Dave hid under his "bivvy", and at one stage we all thought he'd gone to sleep.

We were high on a mountain when we first caught a glimpse of Kingshouse Hotel (our stop for the night) and it seemed like miles away in the distance. The lady from the hotel actually phoned Sally whilst we were on the top having a cuppa to see if we were on our way and she said don't be too disheartened because as you walk closer to the hotel it actually looks further away from you. And sure enough that's exactly what happened - we didn't think we were ever going to get there.

We arrrived at the Hotel and were dead chuffed at having survived the "20 miler". Our rooms were on the bottom floor at the back of the hotel and when we looked our of our windows, we saw half a dozen deer grazing on the grass outside by the river.

Everyone had tales to tell of the day in the bar that night, it was good fun. And we all slept like babies that night and decided we only had 8 miles ahead of us the next day, so we would have a lie in and meet at 9am for breakfast.

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