Speyside Way - Day 3 of 6 - part 2

Continued from Speyside Way - Day 3 of 6 - part 1

And even in the afternoon there were compensatory joys. Like when I’d discover that in trying to consult my iPhone to navigate in the rain, and pulling off my increasingly intractable layers of wet mittens and holding them and my poles and the iPhone in my increasingly numb hands, I had inadvertently dropped  a mitten - there was the joy of actually finding it on the trail after I backtracked and knowing I wouldn’t have to do without it for her duration. (Little hope of replacing it in the small villages where I will be staying). 

Or the joy of being able to actually crawl/wriggle under a barbed wire fence to follow a small track forward to the trail instead of having to completely backtrack. Or if finding on the other side of the private pasture I trespassed that the gate was not locked but only had a complexly knitted wire a bit thicker than an old fashioned hangar to unbend and unhook. (Which I had to do repeatedly since I had lost another mitten on that particular detour.)

Or the joy of learning how to push open these new(to me) types of gates ( the first time I tried I got tangled up with my walking sticks and fell flat on my face). 

Or the joy of arriving, hours later than I had expected, at my lovely hotel and having a wonderful dinner and finding ways to dry all my clothes and swapping trail stories with a solo walker from England who was the only other person having dinner at the hotel or turning it into a story I can share with you. 

So tomorrow (which is actually today as I am writing this morning of Monday April 24) it will be colder but right now no snowfall or rain is predicted during the walk - just fierce wind. It’s a short and supposedly easy walk of 12 miles to Craigellachie. 

And since I keep hearing in my mind  my beloved cousin Alice suggesting that maybe I need to attach my mittens to my rain jacket so I don’t keep dropping them, I am thinking of doing just that (and wearing the rain jacket in the absence of rain, to help break the wind). And I am rather pleased and proud to have figured out a way to do so with the limited resources available - not to mention of having survived the challenge of this particular part of the walk. 

Thank you (and me and imaginary Jesus) for hanging in there with me! Hope to see you tomorrow v