I missed some of the goods bits when I walked across Scotland the previous year – the Cairngorms National Park, Loch Ness, the Isle of Skye.  Surely there’s no better way to see them that to stitch them together into one continuous walking route? 

Hmm. If I’m honest, there probably is.  In retrospect, you’d be better mountain biking quite a lot of it. I’m guessing anyway. If you like mountain biking.  Which I don’t. So I walked.

But this trip had many amazing parts: the high route alongside Loch Ness, going up some of the Cairngorms Munros, the most remote youth hostel in the UK, a Dutch guy with no change of clothes, an American girl with no change of clothes (come on people, this is Scotland), a mouse, a storm, and a French philosopher eating haggis on his birthday.

It’s July 2017.  NHS bureaucracy has once again released me from its icy grip.  I set off on what will prove to be, if not the adventure of a lifetime, then at least the holiday of this year.