Rest day!

Tuesday 3 July – Fort William – rest day.

Rest day! Rest day! Oh how sweet the sound of those two words!

Especially as it was the last rest day we’ll have til the end of Lands End to John O’Groats.

Originally we were scheduled to have two more – tomorrow, here, and on Sunday in Inverness. However, the following days are both long ones, so we’ve opted to in effect split them, doing some of Thursday’s walk tomorrow, and a similar thing in Inverness.

The main reason we’d originally booked in two rest days here was that Peter was keen on climbing Ben Nevis, at 1345m the highest mountain in Britain, and lying conveniently on Fort William’s doorstep. Not for nothing did Peter get the nickname ‘Peter Climb-every-mountain Lee’! However… in the end he decided not to. (Val, of course, was never going to!)

Partly it was a risk mitigation thing. Going up 1300m is one thing- tough but do-able. Descending 1300m, down a steep path, is quite another thing, and if you’re going to have any knee issues it’s during a descent. While the odds were low, they were still there, and given our goal is to reach John O’Groats, it simply wasn’t worth the risk of injury.

The other reason – one he shares with Val – is that he has almost reached ‘peak walking’. After ten weeks of almost constant walking, we are getting a bit weary, and to add in another 6 hour hard slog had little appeal now.

Each day still brings its pleasures – beautiful scenery and (currently) glorious weather – but it’s fair to say that we are more and more looking forward to finishing the walk. It’s a physical challenge, of course, which we fully expected, but it’s also been hard in other ways that we did not predict. To be continually on the move, spending nearly every night in a different room, packing up each morning, is tiring. Eating out every night has also lost its novelty – we are really craving getting back to some good home cooking! Of course the choice of beers and ciders won’t be so extensive back at Chez Mountbatten ……… But not long to go now – only 13 more walking days.

So today, our last rest day, we treated ourselves, getting a few things in Fort William, chilling out in the afternoon heat, then catching the train to Mallaig and back. It wasn’t so much for Mallaig itself – Mallaig’s a small port on the west coast, a key point for ferries to Skye, but not a lot else – but because it is at the end of the train line from Glasgow and there would be some lovely countryside. Both of us adore long-distance trains, and the thought of simply sitting on one, watching the scenery come to us instead of the other way around, was too great to resist. And so we did just that!

Along the way the line passes over the great Glenfinnan Viaduct, famous from its use in a Harry Potter movie, and the line and bridge curve quite conveniently so you can get some great photos – so everyone of course does, including us. We had an hour in Mallaig, which we spent sitting on the rocks overlooking the sea, looking out to the islands of Eigg and Muck and Skye, alluring and mysterious.

Our trip back was on the Jacobite, a steam train service – or would have been had the railways not ruled that the risk of fire was too high. So it was an ordinary diesel that took us back to Fort William.

We found a lovely little pub for a late snack, were charmed by the superbly-talented guitarist who was their music gig for the evening, and of course England got through to the next stage of the World Cup. A great end to a great rest day!

High St, Fort William:

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