Big Catch Up
I can’t complain about life over the last 2 weeks, which followed on from a very sad time - now no less sad, but those who we loved and lost didn’t want us moping about.
The 29th to 30th October saw Running Girl and I marshalling high up in Leanachan Forest for No Fuss’s Relentless 24hr event. That’s a lot easier than cycling around the forest all night - to be in with a chance to win, meant not stopping so there were some interesting spectacles of people having pushed themselves to the very limit of their endurance. But for us, it was a fairly chilled out experience.
From there, I spent a couple of days supporting my parents before Mr Munro picked me up to fly out to Spain for a week’s holiday. I spent 3 days myself in Orgiva on the Alpujarra side of Sierra Nevada while he and my brother headed straight to Monachil (after Shaun - their Ride Sierra Nevada host kindly diverted to take me to my town.) http://ridesierranevada.com/
Glorious peace - sort of. I met up with an old friend I hadn’t seen for 30 years, met new friends, drank a lot of wine, talked a lot and headed to Monachil by bus with a slightly sore head......
Unaccustomed to regular drinking (apart from a wee or large dram) a theme seemed to be developing....
one gentle, but continuous uphill cycle,
Followed by pondering - and consuming - whisky in my hot chocolate to see if it helped my descending...
Lovely long walk...
Followed by a glass of wine and some tapas - just to calm my nerves after a very small dog chased me. I felt that was important.
Things continued in that vein with most occasions interspersed with a glass of wine until I went back to my parents to offer a few days of support, before going to watch Scotland narrowly lose to Australia at the rugby. Deja vu.
Some comfort was then required - below the ramparts of the castle.
And then a little more comfort in the great company of Barr Saunders, Munro and MaGoo in The Grassmarket.
Next day Mr Munro tried to apply his mountain leadership skills to getting us to the Maplin’s store near Haymarket in Edinburgh - a relatively short walk from where we were staying, and from there, to take the bus back to our park and ride near the airport.
Whilst he may be handy with an OS map, he is less sure of an iphone and which way up it goes. Having been diverted from Haymarket on two adjacent roads, on account of the Remembrance gathering, he declined my offer of asking the on-hand policeman to recommend an alternative route. This is a simple solution which women seem to find easy to apply (police or any passing individual,) but that some men, to make a generalisation, tend to be less comfortable with. As chilled out was my other theme of the past 2 weeks (alcohol assisted at times, to be sure,) I had never consulted his iphone map, nor attempted to work out where Maplin was, so I meandered around Edinburgh, following my trusted guide, who was becoming more befuddled by the moment.
For example, why were we crossing the Forth and Clyde canal? Perhaps we should walk along it, he mused. At one point he considered scaling the wall or swimming across the canal to get out of there as it looked like we were walking from the river Forth to the river Clyde. When we finally arrived at Maplins we had taken the squiggliest, circular route imaginable. But he was nevertheless triumphant.
Once the required products were purchased, he came out and went off to the right, in the direction from whence we had come. I did query this as not quite feeling right but he was by now confident. We walked, and walked - passed Gorgie City Farm, Tynecastle (I actually thought we had walked to England by this time but I was confusing it with Tyneside and Newcastle) and enjoyed the apparent happiness of the Destiny Church (definitely gospel) and the rather more bleak appearance of the Mission church, and the increasingly unhappy and gaunt looking people who perked up once they had a tin of beer in their hands (because we met people going to buy their fix and also met them coming back with it because Mr Mountain Man finally acknowledge we should have turned left out of Maplins.) My chilled approach was becoming muted by the blister rubbing on my toe. It was also a stark reminder of the other side of life in Edinburgh. We walked passed Maplins again and found Haymarket less than 5 minutes beyond it. Mr Munro had previously stated that on principle he would never ever take the Edinburgh tram. But with the tram stop being the clearest route to our park and ride and a disgruntled wife, he had to eat his hat.