Dear gentle reader… you’ll be excited to learn that our two traveling souls woke up in Aberfoyle to a brisk morning, prepared to encounter rain, but that never happened and the sun came out and it was a great day indeed! (ha if you get the reference…)

So the hiking today is mostly on logging roads – and a lot of the forest has been harvested – so you’re walking through a bunch of torn down forest so when you get to nice spots you really enjoy them. Yesterday (no post) we hiked from Drymen to Aberfoyle – which was a great first day hike – weather was a bit colder than today – but a lot of the same photos – cows, sheep, old rock walls, more sheep, some grass, more sheep, another rock wall, etc. Generally we are hiking from town to town and there’s nothing really in between, so having your proper gear with you is important. What we are finding is we’re pretty layered up in the morning when we leave, but then as the day progresses we have de-layered a bit, but then towards the latter part of the afternoon the layers come back on.

Today’s hike was pretty spectacular – you’re not working very hard. My Garmin watch monitors our track, and my heart rate – and I think the high was 105 – a lot different from Colorado for sure. The vertical isn’t much to write home about – generally about 1000 feet over several miles. However, Thursday promises to be more exciting, with more vertical orientation and longer days ahead. Saturday is a proper fifteen miler so we should be good and tired at the end of that.

This hike (Rob Roy trail) is definitely the road less traveled by tourists. Our host the other night even said – that’s a strange one, not many people do it. Today, we hiked for 10 miles, saw exactly zero other people on our hike. We were comparing that with the Camino de Santiago quest in northern Spain last year and well it’s polar opposites for sure. Lots of people with very well trained dogs. We’ve passed about 10 so far, not a single bark – a lot of Labrador retrievers as well.

Walked along a golf course today, pretty nice, then saw another today in Callander – that one is definitely nice with gated homes nearby as well. I guess it’s peoples dream to golf in Scotland – I can see why – although I can also see the need to bring plenty of extra golf balls with you here – go out of bounds and it’s gone forever.

The world outside seems to be going a bit nuts (Israel) – we’re pretty disconnected from it, you don’t see CNN blaring everywhere you go here. We sat in a coffee shop – no one was talking about it, no one was using a cell phone and people were generally chatting about life stuff. It makes you realize how invasive the news media is in the US and how it’s constantly in your face every time you turn around.

The most exciting news – we are definitely in Holy Grail quest territory – more to come later about that.