River in Scotland

April 25, Tuesday. Craigellachie to Fochabers. Official estimate 12 miles. iPhone estimates 13.1 to 14.75 miles.  Hello Friends. Thank you so much for taking the time and energy in your precious life to share this walk with me. Writing these blogs - made possible by your caring and supportive presence and your fun and encouraging responses - is as important as the walk itself is to me. Had a bit of a rough night last night. I just couldn’t get my B&B room warm enough. I found windows slightly open and fixed that. I turned the radiator up as high as I could. I was a bit chilled from the walk - just toward the end it had snowed for long enough to get me cold and a little wet. I didn’t realize my under layers were damp and kept wearing them, which contributed to the chill. I’m sure part of why I lived the fire in the bar last night was that I finally got warm and all those clenched shivery muscles began to let go and relax. Or did I unconsciously know I was being allowed to warm ...

Continued from Speyside Way - Day 4 of 6 - part 1 Okay. You are not going to believe this. I’m sitting here eating my dinner in this pub and a man walks in and orders a dram of whisky and mentions that it is his birthday. And I notice a swirl of sexual energy when he is in the room. Which is odd for me to notice, because I am not very attuned (actually I am very un-attuned) to sexual energy in this particular stage if my life). But after he has left and returned a few times I figure what are pubs for, pubs are for stories, so I ask about his birthday and what leads him to be celebrating it in this particular place. It turns out he is on a special tour his younger brother created for the two of them and two other close friends to celebrate the younger brother’s “big” 70th birthday. And the younger brother has planned especially that they would be staying at the lodge of which this pub is a part on the older brother’s birthday because this lodge is their former home. This is the hous...

April 24, Monday. From ballindalloch to Craigellachie. Official estimate 13 miles. My iPhone guessed 15 and this time I did not get lost, though I may not have made my way to my B&B in the most efficient way.  Right now it is Monday evening here and I am sitting in front of a fire in a small pub that is part of a B&B. I am the only person here and I love listening to music and watching the fire. Funny - I take in how much I love it when I write these words and imagine you reading them, and I sigh and more fully arrive.  The beauty of the fire (a real wood fire, not gas) - it’s movement and the ever changing shapes and brightness of the flames - evokes the moving experience I had walking beside the Spey River today. It was the first time on this walk called the Speyside walk that I have actually spent time beside the River Spey. I wondered if I could walk in time with it. Sometimes it was too fast for me, other times I felt I was walking at its pace exactly. I began to ...

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 sinc...

April 23, Sunday. Walked from Grantown-On-Spey to Ballindaloch. Official estimate was 14 miles plus 1 mile off the Way to my hotel. My various iPhone apps say I walked 17.5 so 18 miles.  I hope this post will be brief. I was cold and wet and increasingly miserable as the day went on. I suspect in more pleasant weather I would have enjoyed the hike and the landscapes (in the first part of the day I did, actually.) But in the last half, as I kept backtracking for a lost mitten or a missed way mark, or detouring to find my way back to the trail, I began to imagine this trail devised here in the land of whisky by a group of whisky lovers sitting around late at night in a pub. All of them are telling stories about how to plan the trail aling an impossibly crazy zigzagging route that no one can possibly follow. Each one outdoing the others in far fetched trail planning tales and all of them laughing til their bellies ache and then laughing some more. Let’s make it go this way, then that ...

Continued from Speyside Way - Day 2 of 6 - part 1 So at least I’m having fun blogging again. And maybe I’m practicing a little what imaginary jesus is trying to teach me by loving blogging even when I am keenly aware of how flawed it is, how fallible I am as a writer. It’s a crazy idea he has that I resist believing him, letting him become a vivid presence in my imagination, because I am afraid to feel his love. Because I never got over feeling loved - having faith in that possibility - and having it be shattered. But Jesus is trying to tell me that’s just part of the way things are. We don’t have an option of a perfect universe with perfect love.  Last night after a long day I took myself out for Indian food which I expected to really enjoy and was very disappointed. It was way too hot and I couldn’t enjoy it. I blamed myself for not ordering carefully enough. But tonight I decided to go out for Indian food again - sort of like get right back on the horse after you fall off -...

April 21, Saturday. From Aviemore to Grantown-on-Spey. Estimate was 17. IPhone said 20. I suspect some of the discrepancy was my losing my way a couple of times and having to back track to get back on the trail - I also suspect the official one was an underestimate.  I am relaxing in a private room with a private bath, which feels like a great luxury after staying in a hostel dorm with a shared bath down the hall last night.  The shared room was especially challenging because I had already gotten dressed and packed up (and no doubt repeatedly disturbed my dorm mate’s sleep) when I realized it was 12:30am not 6:00 am. If I had a room to myself I would probably have felt free to unpack. As it was I left my packed backpack in the hall and crawled into bed in my clothes - and never really got back to sleep.  So this morning at 5am (having had maybe a couple of 20minute naps since the midnight fiasco), I decided I might as well get up. I didn’t actually start walking until 6 s...