| Summary | None |
| Owner | Nadine Mueller-Dittmann |
| Creation Date | 2013-05-21 17:50:29 UTC-0400 |
| Description | John Romanishin, Eric Gilbertson, Nadine Mueller-Dittmann
05.12.2013 Pictures by John & Eric ______________________________________________ The hammock was slowly cradling back and forth, some chilled air breezed over my face and I took a deep, humid good-morning breath. I woke up and for a short second went through this “What’s going on?” moment of confusion until I quickly realized: “oh, right! We are in Scotland!” Together with MITOCs unofficial chairs for awesome-sunrise-hikes & fun-highpoint-adventures, John and Eric I had come to Ireland and the UK for a long weekend. Having realized this, I jumped out of my hammock looking forward to another fun day. John and Eric were both ready for take-off when I came out of the bathroom and admired the view up to Ben Nevis Mountain in the meanwhile. And there was good reason for it. Ben Nevis, covered in clouds had been kind and nice with us the previous day and we got to see the (for me) most incredible and unexpected summit experience you can think of! So, the mountain did an awesome job enchanting us, but today was time to wake up – in cold monster water ;)! We paid the fees at the campground (for we had arrived after midnight) and got a discount even, for not having a tent – thank you Ryanair for your hardcore carry-on luggage restrictions! When making our way to Fort William the sun came out (ok, I have to clarify this in case you haven’t been to Scotland yet. “An awesome sunny day” basically means, the sky is still covered in clouds, except for a tiny spot of blue in between – for just a few seconds only, …. of course!). And it was as if, Scottish people wanted to confirm the good weather theory, because immediately we saw an open convertible passing by. We had to laugh seeing that because it seemed like THE ultimate demonstration of determinedly undeviating optimism: buying and driving a convertible in Scotland! - “We should get sunscreen! Otherwise we might get burned!” I said and Eric responded: “Oh, I hear they don’t sell sunscreen in the whole country!” Mh, seems like we weren’t prepared well for this trip! However, we spotted a sign offering breakfast and stopped at that place. John was looking forward to a good-morning coffee and Eric discovered delighted the buy-one-get-one-free £6 breakfast option that he gladly took (only the waitress seemed a little confused about that, since she first expected me to go for the second one ;)). Happy and refueled we made our way towards Inverness and Lake Loch Ness on A82. After 50 min or so, we passed a lock at Fort Augustus south-west of the lake and Eric advised to “turn on monster radar”. For the monster, John even took a break of his beloved nap time and provided insider infos to us: “Did you know that Loch Ness – though it’s not the biggest lake - holds more water than any other Scottish lake?” It seemed reasonable to Eric: ”Yeah, it must have, since it has to host a huge monster!” John, now awake, went on entertaining us. He had been in a creative mood of inventing imaginary outdoor countries earlier: “I feel, there should be a Bikestan!” – “yeah, MinWah’s there, right now!” – “When we found it, we should locate it right next to Packraftistan” – “And don’t forget about Hikestan! I bet, Eric would wanna live there” we were joking. As a logic consequence he also suggested to establish our personal Outdoorclubs namely JohnTOC, EricTOC & NadineTOC ;). So, as usual, it was pretty funny with John and he made us laughing a lot! Not far from Fort Augustus we stopped at some castle at a village with the jawbreaker name Drumnadochit (I still don’t have a clue how to pronounce it correctly + often had to ask John and Eric: “Was that English?” because I barely understood what people said). But after some walking around, we had to get back in the car because John realized “oh, it’s an hour past nap time already!” and we went on searching for a beach on the +20 miles stretching shore of the lake. It wasn’t too easy to find some accessible place, though we got lucky almost before reaching Inverness. John tested for the temperature and claimed “oh, that’s way too cold for swimming” – but I could see in his eyes, it wouldn’t be too hard for us to convince him to join. And Eric knew the best strategy by saying: “You know that you’ll successfully have qualified for sissyTOC if you don’t plunge in?!!!!” Some subseconds later, after the tourists had left, we found ourselves swimming and John - in the end - made it the hero of the cold water because he stayed inside the longest. Luckily the monster didn’t want to snack German/American hiker that day – so we were just fine and also very refreshed & awake after that (is there any more efficient way to wake up than cold water??? – I doubt it!). We also assumed the lake probably stays almost same temperature (means: pretty cold) throughout the year, since there’s no sun in that country. Eric had told me earlier, he wanted a picture for his mom to proof his monster-lake-swimming skills. Mh, seems like we’ve totally forgotten about this when we all just ran and jumped into Nessie lake at the same time. So, sorry, Eric’s mom – but, I hope two witnessing co-swimmer are a good substitute for the photo evidence. We went further to Edinburgh and just shortly stopped in Perth for getting food. Unfortunately we didn’t have much time left and ended up at KFC. It’s been very first KFC experience for me and we made fun of Eric, why the waiters hadn’t seen he was from Kentucky and had given him discounts ;). We switched drivers in Perth and later I was quite relieved I didn’t have to go through downtown Edinburgh at “wrong side traffic”. Eric was so kind to drop us at the hostel, although he was a little time-pressured to catch his first flight of his upcoming travelling-home-marathon (Glasgow – Dublin – Frankfurt – Boston). John and I checked in at the “Castle Rock Hostel” that luckily had some free space for us. It was funny, because they had this concept of naming beds. We slept in the room, called “the Scottish menu” (there was a “haggis bed” even). We got to sleep in some side dishes, we both hadn’t ever heard of before. At around 8:30 PM we made our way to Edinburgh for food (important note: I’ll strongly advise you to take at least a headlamp, hiking boots, maybe climbing/camping gear and certainly a good camera when going for dinner with John!). So we spontaneously decided to conquer “Arthurs Seat” for sunset (some rock of volcanic origin within walking distance of the city). We walked through the “inspiring capital of Scotland” as Edinburgh refers to itself at the cities entrance and discovered how everything really looks like in a Harry Potter movie (jup, the books were written there)! Soon we started climbing up the windy mountain and could see far out from where we had entered by car. Again, the sun showed up and revealed an awesome view all over Edinburgh. It’s nice because there are many historic buildings, castles & churches you can see from up there and John really took great pictures. I imagined it must be cool being up there after dark with all the lights and luckily John said, he’d be up for that as well. We made it down for dinner to some thai/indian restaurant (again no real Scottish food experience for us – but if they serve haggis in that country – maybe, lucky us?!) and ended up in the “where the world ends”-bar where a drunk waiter tried to entertain us, poured in cocktails we didn’t order and they didn’t want us to pay for ;). After the bar closed at midnight we started climbing up the mountain one more time and really got cool views all around! It was so windy at the top that I was a little concerned about John’s camera moving off, when he tried to capture us by self-timer (we placed some bigger stones on top of it). With long exposure times we got experimental about moving arms to turn them into wings. Ha, that didn’t work, so instead we got one, where it seems like I don’t have arms at all ;). It was pretty late, once we came to the hostel and I fell happily asleep (jep, in the side dish bed). The next day we took the authentic double-decker bus to the airport and I got to learn this new vocabulary (which is easy, because it’s same in German except for the spelling: Doppeldeckerbus). Of course John took a nap during the flight ;) and we made it back safely + in time to Germany. I’m always feeling fortunate to having some MITOC spirit brought to Europe and was especially looking forward it was John and Eric to come. I had gone on my very first MITOC trip with the two and still considered them responsible for infecting me with that MITOC-virus ;)! Mh, what shall I say – after that weekend with all the fun stuff we’d experienced, they did pretty well in maintaining the infection ;). -Nadine |