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Wandering Ft. William – Post Ben Nevis Recouperating – July 8

After going pretty hard for most of our trip, we decided we’d earned a rest day. What exactly does that entail for us? Well, it doesn’t exactly mean hanging out and doing nothing all day.

First stop, the Ben Nevis Visitor Centre, so I could get a pin and maybe a sticker or something. Plus, it was so foggy we wanted to see how bad it was near the trail head. Answer – densely foggy. I was so happy I went ahead and hate-hiked that mountain yesterday when it was gloriously sunny and clear.

Next up – Neptune’s Staircase. Wait, what? Fish don’t have feet. No, no they don’t. Nor is this a salmon ladder (my first guess). It is a series of eight locks that form part of the Caledonian Canal.

Which, as it turns out, is an engineering marvel that fell flat upon completion because it was….

Poorly constructed – It’s still standing and functional, so I’m confused by this assertion, but that’s what the signs said.
Too narrow – Victorian technology moved faster than they were able to imagine, apparently.
Too shallow – See above.

We had very good timing because as we approached, we noticed four sailboats heading into the first lock! Neat! My first reaction to seeing the crew and the boats – “Oh hell no, would I be traveling very far via sailboat. Thanks.”

That being said, watching the boats go through the locks was pretty neat. For one thing, it was a lot quicker than I thought it would be. I believe they said it would be two hours to go through all eight locks. After watching the boats, we meandered up the trail a little bit before coming back to have a nice cup of tea and a pastry in the lock side hotel. Oh clotted cream, how I love you so very much!

Next up – finding the actual geocache. We’d already jumped through the hoops to log a find on the earthcache, but there was also a real cache nearby and so of course I was going to look for it! Found it before the midges got to me, those little bastards. They make mosquitoes seem harmless in comparison!

We headed back into Ft. William to try our hand at more caches. This ended up being more difficult than imagined because while we found a very handy car park, we could not figure out how to get out of it and across the main road on foot. There was a railing and lots of vehicles. We tried a few different ways until Chad finally spied the underpass that led to freedom and the original Fort William, which was basically a nice little waterside park with plenty of signage and campers in the way of a cache.

When our tummies started to growl we headed back to downtown Ft. William, which by the way is either the beginning or the end of the West Highland Way, and that makes for some grand people watching! And, if you choose correctly, some very yummy food and drink. This time around we chose wisely and found ourselves a nice little chain restaurant/pub that had a nice selection of cask beer. Hooray!

Since yesterday had been a rather tiring adventure, after stuffing ourselves, we headed back up to our lodging (a nice Air BnB room in the neighborhood a bit up the hill – it came with a cat, the hill was modest to walk) for a well deserved nap! While this was not our first Air BnB adventure, it was definitely the first time we’d rented an en-suite room in someone’s house. But we figured eh, if our host was an ax murder, at least we’d be killed AFTER we hiked Ben Nevis. She was absolutely not an ax murdered, but a very nice lady who had the first floor in a nice Victorian house. (Seems Victorian in the UK is a bit different than what I think of as Victorian here, mainly I suspect because Victorian here is considered a fairly definitive style not a time period in which things were built.) Our room was purple with a silver ceiling and all kinds of cute touches. I love it. And I slept like a rock.