Well we completed the last day (two days ago) – ended up being a great hike with a simple up/down hill (1000 feet) but mid-hike there’s a very small town with a chocolate shop – oh wasn’t someone surprised and excited to see that! We were out the door by 9 a.m., hiked the first five miles pretty fast and were able to have a nice break before finishing the last five miles into Pitlochry. Overall I’d say an easy path. We did find some exciting historic rocks/stones – Cindy was thinking that they worked like Outlander rocks and that if you touched them you went back in time – but they weren’t – so we took some pictures and then finished our hike.

Pitlochry is very nice – reminds me of a mini Vail or Aspen like feel. We ended up staying in a Castle for our hotel – which was very nice, and we started running into more mainstream tourists (e.g. not hikers). The town was full as was our hotel.

On our hike we met a nice lady on a horse who has had him for 23 years – and used to do hunts with him – I’ll assume fox hunts – but a seriously large horse to be riding around on the trail. Beyond that we really didn’t meet or see anyone else on our path (again) and that was just cool. In Spain last year you couldn’t get away from other people – on this trip we had others few and far between – if at all. We did connect with two nice gentlemen from Oakland and Sacramento – who were doing the same hike – they were more purist’s not wanting to skip even a step on the actual path – where I was more than willing to skip walking on asphalt.

Yesterday we took the train from Pitlochry to Edinburgh then to London. It’s super easy and convenient to travel by train here – just buy your seats/tickets online and you’re set. It was a long day, taking 2 hours for the first part then almost five for the latter part. We took an hour break in Edinburgh which was good. Once in London we stayed again at the Pelham hotel in knightsbridge – they upgraded our room to a “kings room” – which was really fabulous – I think if you were there for work it would be the room to stay in. While fancy and big, other than sleeping and getting dressed we typically don’t spend a bunch of time in a hotel room, so the extra space is lost on us. It was amazing to think that people do book and stay in these places for weeks at a time – and I’m sure it’s $750+ per night. I did really like our hotel, it’s very nice, and you’re right in the action – easy to take the subway/train to/from the airport – which we did this morning and takes about 45 minutes. If you have heavy bags then you should Taxi, but if you’re more nimble it’s an easy way to go and costs about $5 each way. Heathrow airport is huge – took us an hour to get from the train through security to our gate – so glad we left on the earlier side this morning.

That’s really about it – for the most part a great closing to a really great trip – I’m going to write another post just summarizing it – it’s amazing how many pings I get on even our South America adventure from this simple website – others looking to ask questions, etc. I realized while walking on this one that it’s been ten years since we went to South America. Of course now I want to rent a Land Rover, take driving lessons, rent a Yellow Lab and drive northern Scotland for several weeks. Of course my problem will be all the other people that want to hike in the same season that I do… the benefit of a September trip is a lot of people are back and work/school/etc. The down side is it’s cold. We missed the rain by exactly one day – other parts of England had 300%+ of rain in September and it was unusually dry in Scotland in September – but when we woke up yesterday it was pouring rain and I thought – wow we missed that. Also thinking that walking for hours and hours in mud and wet rocks is not that great fun – and visibility isn’t great so you cannot see things with low fog, etc. So we really lucked out.