Having arrived after a quite dramatic introduction to Perthshire, we awake beside our very own loch to howling wind and rain (which kept Katherine up all night and dogged her dreams with visions of a flooding Nettle), and rather quickly our plans for a day-long hike dissolve.
To be honest, I’m personally not so shattered at the idea of spending the day in, as I’ve just discovered an unlimited 3G Internet plan, and have successfully finished downloading Valve Software’s Portal 2, a game I’ve been looking forward to for years.
Still, we hang around by the loch for a few hours, in case the very changeable weather changes for the better, watching the rain drum against the window (as I happily load up Portal 2 and get my geek on). The time comes to concede defeat, however, and we scoot down the mountain again to take up residence in the local campsite, a very pretty treed spot with a family of ducks that make their rounds every day.
So begins a very damp series of days, well and truly thwarting our sightseeing plans, while I have a tremendously enjoyable geeky few days off (although this admittedly starts to happen to me). Eventually our time’s up, and fortunately, the weather has also cleared up a little, so we bid the ducks farewell and take off on a bit of a driving tour alongside the picturesque Loch Tay and up Glen Lyon, a spot promising to have us believing in faeries before the day’s out.
We pass though bright green woods alongside a tea-coloured river, bluebells adorning the bank on the upper side, and pass alongside fields dotted with curly-horned sheep, stretching up the sides of the surrounding mountains, craggy and punctuated with the silver veins of streams.
We jump out at the midpoint and switch transport methods, cycling onwards as the scenery becomes ever wilder, emerald fields giving way to bracken. I startle a couple of impressively-antlered deer who bound in slow motion into the woods on the upper bank. The skies open up on us again, just long enough to drive us back down the road before abruptly stopping and being replaced by intense sunshine, so we shrug, turn around again and continue.
Finally, we head back to Nettle and drive back up the mountain to our spot beside the reservoir for the night.
