Knowing that we weren’t in a hurry, we actually slept in in our little tent and only got packed and ready for breakfast by shortly before ten. This was a mistake, as it turned out: we discovered that we needed to have the bags at King’s House and ourselves back at the intersection of the ski road and A82 by 11:18–a two and a half mile walk, the last 1/3 uphill. We virtually trotted down the hill and deposited the bags in plenty of time. We really had to race back uphill, and I’ll admit that I overdid it–as I soon discovered. We were in plenty of time for the Scottish Citylink bus, though. We were shocked by the fare: 6 1/2 quid for a 25 minute ride! The difference between fares purchased at stations and travel agencies and on the bus is steep.
The road passes by the opening to Glen Etive, where the final sequences of the Bond Skyfall were filmed, by the Herdsman, and into the pass of Glencoe with the mountains rising increasingly precipitously.
Some absolutely incredible mountain scenery here–and we had bright sunshine to enjoy it. Many descriptions of the glen have it as dark and foreboding, which I can see under “normal” weather conditions.
We got off at the Visitor Center and had a quick look around, then started down the path toward the village. The path passes by some of the main sites of the Glencoe Massacre, which we really didn’t understand well at the time. Not far down the path I started noticing a pain in my left calf, and I was soon hobbling slowly. I had clearly strained it running up form the inn to the bus stop.
Glencoe village isn’t much: a mountain rescue station, lots of B&B’s, a small grocery, a cafe, and a Scottish Catholic church, which was just letting out, with the priest in full orange and purple regalia as we passed by.
We were very short on cash, and looking forward to restocking at one of the two cash machines in the village, the first since Tyndrum. Unfortunately, the machine at the village store was out of order. We had a very nice lunch at the little cafe, with good homemade soup and a nice piece of orange sponge before trying the machine at the one gas station in town.
I rested my leg near the bus stop while Sue tried–but she struck out. It was unclear whether the machine had a bad data connection or whether our debits were rejected, so I called PNC. I first spent ten pounds only to be cut off, then spent ten more pounds, this time reaching an agent, who had just gotten into our account after Sue remembered the $1000 deposit from Andrew Dechet we had just made–a guess at my paycheck and its source wasn’t good enough! Luckily, I had started by telling the guy the problem, because right after he got into the account I ran out of money again. I have to assume that he unblocked us, because the cards worked flawlessly for the rest of the trip, and we were a bit nervous, because we still had very little cash until we would reach Kinlochleven late the next day.
We were back at King’s House mid afternoon, and we got into our room–very, very basic but perfectly in keeping with the inn–and lounged around for a while before descending again to the bar, only to find John from Boston! I bought him a drink and we traded stories of the walk. He had not only used a baggage service, but had slept only in inns, which made for some short days–and, in two cases, for being ferried back and forth by taxi to the same inn when an inn further along was booked. Not how I’d like to do the walk–you would probably lose all sense of continuity–but to each his own.
We agreed to meet for dinner at seven. As we were chatting at the bar with the barman, we were talking about long distance walking in Europe and America, and were soon joined by a very voluble Scotsman of indeterminate age–perhaps 65, but, as we soon learned, he had suffered a heart attack, gotten into incredible shape, and may have been younger than he looked. He was a bit crazy, a mad outdoorsman who was up here from Bristol, where he lived, to do some mountain bike training for his attempt at the Continental Divide Mountain Bike Trail–2200 miles on logging roads from Banff to New Mexico! He had walked everywhere in Europe and was full of good stories. He ate with us (Sue had poached salmon and I had a venison burger) and we all bought a round, either of beer or of whisky.
A nice shower in the shared bath rounded out the day, and I slept like a log.