Midges

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The plan today was to take the train to Glenfinnen, have a look around, take the train to Fort William, have a look around, take the train home. I read up a bit on Glenfinnen, I already knew that it was where Bonnie Prince Charlie first set foot in Scotland and started the Jacobite uprising. I also knew that it had the train bridge which featured in the Harry Potter movies. My reading didn't reveal anything more. Well, the book said to keep your eyes open for the wild life because there's a lot around. Yeah, right. I'm not going bush, so I'm not going to see any. On the walk from the Glenfinnen train station to the town, we saw a stag. It was just standing on the other side of the road on an embankment just ahead of us, chewing grass. I told Cheri, and we both stopped to have a look. He looked up at us and... went back to chewing his grass. We took a photo, then continued down the road thinking he would run, but he didn't. We ended up on the opposite side of the road to him without him bolting. We took a few more photos. He couldn't care less. We ambled in to Glenfinnen and left him to it. It was a beautiful day in Glenfinnen, we took some photos of the loch and the viaduct (now more or less officially known as the Harry Potter bridge) and then wandered back to the station. On the way up we encountered a wee brown frog. We took a photo of him. He ignored us. We got to the station in time to see a steam train pull in, allowing a host of fat, sweaty passengers to hop out. We caught a more normal kind of train and headed in to Fort William.
Fort William turns out to be a pretty boring kind of place. The town is fairly nice, however there isn't much (if anything) to do. We ended up sitting in the park getting sun burnt. Ha! we sat in that park for two hours in direct sunlight during the middle of the day and I got the kind of burn you get in NZ after about five minutes. I can only feel it when I remember that I've got it and concentrate on it. It's 9pm as I write this and already it's starting to fade. Their sun could take a few lessons in burning-ness-ity from our sun.
Back in Corpach, we walked to the top of the canal lock system known as Neptunes Staircase. It was a very nice walk with views to Ben Nevis. Speaking of which, the guy that runs this hostel is hosting a bunch of people tonight (apparantly everyone in the hostel except us and 4 others) who are going to climb it tomorrow for charity. This is the tallest mountain in Britain and you can walk to the summit in three and a half hours. Charities do Ben-Nevis-athons. Try doing that on Mt Cook.
Midge update: Daniel v Midges; Daniel 0, Midges 0. Cheri v Midges; Cheri 0, Midges 100+.

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