Scotland 2002

June 17th to June 19th, 2002

Loch Ossian, Meall na Slingearaich, ScotRail

Note:  Click on the picture to see a larger version.

Today we followed our fearless leader, Graham (who used his fishing pole as a tour leader flag substitute), upstream to Loch na Lap (750 meters) to do some fly fishing.  Little did I know what I was in for.  Going upstream felt like going upstate.  We walked and walked and walked amidst sporadic rain showers in fields of moss.  One overzealous leap to the other side of a stream caused me to be covered head to toe in muck.  Was quite hilarious, though.  Definitely a Kodak moment.  Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), no one took a picture of this sad sad event.

After Graham's non-eventful fishing expedition, we descended through Meall na Slingearaich (611 meters) to Srath Ossian (aka Strathossian, Valley of the Ossian) before making our way back to Loch Ossian and another 3.5 miles to the other side of the lake and to our hostel.

We left Loch Ossian a little over two hours earlier than planned because ScotRail canceled our 8:48pm London sleeper train due to freight train derailment the previous day.  We caught the 6:27pm Glasgow bound train and tried our luck for seats on a London-bound train out of Glasgow.  Jen was able to exchange our original sleeper train tickets for the 11:40pm sleeper train out of Glasgow to London.  To kill time, we hung out at the station pub and had a few pints of beer.  I wolfed down a Whopper Junior with cheese and had a share of the 4 large orders of Burger King fries.  Our London bound train waited until well after 1am before departing.  We boarded the train early enough to each stake out two seats.  We were able to sleep almost comfortably all the way back to London.