Yin yoga, breakfast, walking, lunch and a day of walking. That sums up today in 10 words.
Today’s start is slow, as slowly is the best way to start. You probably know that by now. The first goal of the day is to walk up Ben A’an. It’s the most popular hill here in the Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park, because from the top you are supposed to have great views over Loch Katrine and Loch Achray.
The walk will be short, but steep. An extra reason to start the day with some yoga. Where Sara rolls out her yoga mat, I decide to do yoga in bed. I do have a good excuse for that. The little house we’re staying in, is so small it only has space for one yoga mat.
Sara likes to do Vinyasa flow. I’m happy to do Yin yoga. Especially during the weeks I run and walk a lot, like these weeks. So, the floor is hers, the bed is mine.
Most popular mountain
Around lunch time we arrive at Ben A’an. We didn’t expect to be the only one, but we also didn’t expect to find a full parking lot. As soon as we start to make our way up the hill, we notice that a full parking lot, also means a full trail. By the sound of all the conversations around us, a full trail of tourists and locals.
When we are almost at the top, and the path becomes smaller, we take a little break. Sara feels light headed and has problems focusing her eyes. The last two days she has hardly eaten. The first day because she ate something wrong, the second day, because her stomach still felt painful. The lack of food is now taking its toll. She offers to wait, so I can go to the top on my own, but I prefer to stay by her side. Sara is a tough cookie, so if she says she doesn’t feel well, she really doesn’t.
We rest for a couple of minutes, after which we make our way down, back to the car, back to Callander for a big lunch; fish and chips for Sara, a Scottish fish broth with garlic bread for me.
Spawning salmon
The lunch gives Sara new energy and we decide to do another walk. A short one to Leny Falls near Kilmahog, only 2,5 kilometres from Callander. The walk is an easy one, over a combined cycle-walkway. Easy but boring, so instead of turning around, after looking at the white foaming water, where the salmon will swim up to spawn next month, we decide to go on a little adventure.
My AllTrails app shows a tiny little track, going up the mountain. It’s so tiny, it takes us a couple of minutes to find it. In the beginning it’s not wider than the size of my shoe. Now I do have 47,5 (US 13,5), but still….
Purple Erica
After following the muddy path for a few hundred meters through the woodlands, the trees suddenly stop and we have an open field, full of shrubs in front of us. Here the path isn’t anything more than a little opening between the purple Erica.
We keep climbing upwards, getting a more beautiful view over the surrounding area with every meter we rise. After more or less twenty minutes we reach a gravel road, the Ben Ledi Hill path, that leads towards a pine tree forest. The trees are so close on top of each other that they form a blur in front of our eyes. No matter how hard we try, we can’t focus on one single tree.
We follow the road back down, up until it crosses the combined cycle-walkway, just outside of Callander, which brings us back to our little tiny house on the Callander Youth Project. When we check our watch, it tells us that we’ve had a day of walking of 20 kilometers. Not bad for a day not feeling so good.
