My 2nd Love

My 2nd love is The Great Outdoors. To be more precise; mountain climbing, hill walking, hiking, trekking, whatever you want to call it I just love getting out and about and seeing parts of the beautiful country I live in. A lot of people in Scotland don’t realise how lucky they are to be living here. Then again I do appreciate that my beloved hobby is not everyone’s cup of tea. Luckily for me my brother also feels the same way about exploring our fine country.
My itchy feet were getting the better of me over the last couple of weeks and so today we went out on our first jaunt this year. Part of the reason for these excursions is to keep in shape, fit, and healthy. It’s also some good training for my son Dean as we’re planning to walk the West Highland Way during the summer so we need to cram in as much practise as possible between now and then.

Ben Venue is a rugged little mountain, at 2385 ft it qualifies as a Graham. Apparently it’s usually quite a quiet mountain as most people into this type of thing aren’t too interested in Grahams. Instead they would be out bagging the neighbouring mountains of Ben Lomond or Ben Ledi. Today however the mountain was busy! On the way up we met 6 people, when we got to the summit 4 of them were up there at the same time as us. Coming down we bumped into at least another 6 different people coming up from the other direction. Including our little group that makes 15 people on the mountain at the same time (that we knew of) 15 is nothing compared to Ben Lomond on a good summer day, but it’s a lot for a lowly Graham on a bitterly cold day at the start of March!

I also got try out my newest toy. An eTrex Summit by Garmin. I’ve never owned a GPS before so I’m a complete noob to it all. It’s a great gadget. You can pre-load a route on it from the comfort of your home. Drive out to your destination, select the route from an on-screen menu, click the “Follow” button and that’s it! You follow an arrow which points in the direction you should be heading to stay on course. It keeps track of your distance travelled, speed and elevation. It also creates a track which is the actual route you walked, when you get home you plug the GPS back into your computer and compare what you actually walked to what the route said you should have walked. It’s really cool and I’m gonna have a lot of fun with it.

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