The agony and the ecstasy
Hattie Taylor from Hertfordshire, walking with Patrick Davis, discovered the highs were worth the lows
“A bus?” The man asked shaking his head in confusion. “How did you get here?”
Too quickly I replied, “Walked. We walked from Mallaig!” Pat grinned next to me, tender feet resting on the warm sand. “Where’s that?” the man asked. “The west coast.”
We had just walked the 180 miles from the west coast to the east coast of Scotland, ending at Dunnottar Castle on a day with perfect clear skies. Blisters, sunburn, aches and even midge bites were temporarily forgotten. We were simultaneously overjoyed to have achieved the Challenge we had spent months preparing for and desperately sad that it was all over.
Our rucksacks, dirty and battered, lay in the sand next to us. For two weeks we had hauled them through rain, blistering heat and clouds of midges. In them we’d stored everything we needed to survive, including the little blue tent that we now thought of as home.
Setting off on the first day from Mallaig, the sky was clear. Our packs felt light. We had two full weeks ahead of us. It was perfect. Then the midges came. Trekking through a bog, in the heat, with our heavy packs it felt like we may not have made the right holiday choice. Then we turned a bend in the path and Loch Nevis opened up before us, bathed in the light of the setting sun, framed by the distant mountains, a herd of red deer by the loch’s edge. It was an image so close to my idealised image of Scotland I could scarcely believe it was real.
For the duration of our adventure we found this pattern repeating: one minute everything hurt and we were sure we would never finish, the next we were walking through a fairytale.
And as soon as we set foot on that homebound bus we were already planning our next TGO Challenge...
This was Hattie and Pat’s first TGO Challenge.