Great Glen Way. Part 1: Procrastination and Setting Off

Planning for an adventure can send me into anxiety mode. Thinking about the Great Glen Way was no different: how many days, where would I stay, do I need extra kit, where would I eat, how do I get to the start, how do I get home, when do I start, could I really do this? There were too many variables. I started to panic. But then I voiced my concerns to let them escape my head. After pouring my thoughts out to a friend, I was asked, “Do you want to talk about it?”. That was it. No, I didn’t want to talk about it, I wanted to get on with it.

Half an hour later, I had booked my train ticket to Fort William and three nights of accommodation. I would walk the Great Glen Way in four days, leaving Glasgow by train on the first day. Sorted.

With my husband gone for a week of Mountain Leader training, I had a couple of days to myself to prepare at my own pace. That, of course, meant absolutely not preparing and instead baking a three-tier cake for my boss’s birthday, personally delivering it and watching as much Orange Is The New Black as possible. Winning the adventure procrastination game.

In between making a mess of the kitchen and telling Netflix that, yes, I was still watching, I’d bought a new backpack to limit the amount of kit I could take with it. From overnight bothy adventures, I had a 60L backpack that I knew would just encourage me to overload it with unnecessary extra sets of clothes and additional stuff. There was also no way I could fit as much as I needed in my small daysack. My new 28L purple Osprey number did the trick and encouraged me to actually make sure I had everything else for the trip.

As much as I am the Queen of Proscratinatia, I’m also a very organised person. So, when I’m prepping for an adventure and I’m in the zone: I am boss. For this trip, I laid everything out on the kitchen floor in rough categories: clothes, food, warm layers, downtime, hygiene, technology, other, other-other, miscellaneous… it got a little out of hand. My goal was to keep the weight down, so, once I could see everything laid out, I stripped it all down to the bare minimum. A whole set of clothes went back in drawers. I even weighed two books and chose the lightest (by 20g!) to accompany me. An hour or two later, I was content with the carefully arranged 9kg pack and ready to go.

Pre-adventure nerves motivated me into getting the bus really early into the centre of Glasgow for my journey up to Fort William, on day one. I was nervous about starting my first day of walking just after midday but didn’t want to fork out for another night of accommodation just for the luxury of a few extra hours of daylight. And, anyway, sitting on a train for four hours would be a great way for me to transition from having been working at home for six months. I would emerge into Fort William, breathe in the fresh highland air and start walking with a smile on my face.

Only, it didn’t quite work out like that. The first thing that struck me when I stepped onto the bus was quite how apocalyptic the world felt. Face masks were mandatory, as we were living in a world with coronavirus as the main health threat. Seats had been taped off, to separate people. The city centre wasn’t much better. What would usually be an enjoyable walk, during which I’d skip between energetic groups of students, dodge suit-wearers on phones and weave around excited tourists craning their necks at the glorious buildings, transformed into a gloomy, grey march with streets of distance between me and the small handful of disguised people walking the other way.

However, I was only four hours away from Fort William the start of an 80 mile refresher in monster country. That was until I looked at the departures board and saw that my train had been cancelled. A quick search found that I’d hop on a bus at Crianlarich which would actually get me into Fort William half an hour early. The silver lining to my gloomy, grey cloud. No bother!

The train pulled away from Glasgow and I settled into the journey, eager to see the city and suburbs disappear as the green fields, dense forests and vast lochs appeared. The same friend who had offered to calm my anxiety with a chat about planning was excited for me and we were exchanging hopeful messages. I was still concerned about covering a big distance with a late start, but she told me that Chris Hemsworth was in Inverness and was leaving on Saturday afternoon so I’d better get a move on.

My next message to her was a photo of my view from the window, with the caption “That’s the overhead wire. It’s not meant to be there”. Something had felled the cable to eye level and the train had stopped mid-way to Dumbarton. I was still in the suburbs. I remained in the suburbs, stuck in the metal tube, for over two hours. The slightly altered train plans turned into a focused mission to come up with alternative plans. ScotRail had a duty to get their passengers to their destinations, however, so I put my faith in rail replacement buses and just did some maths to work out when I was likely to meet the start of the trail. When would be too late to start?