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First off - food.
Regarding what we ate, it was going to be a winner in principle, but in
the end I didn't do so well and made a bit of a cock of it. We bought
all the fancy lightweight stuff that, all in, adds up to something like
5000 calories per day. What I didn't take into account was that I'm
picky, and probably because of that, the food didn't taste good and I
didn't eat it. Bad mistake. While the whole lot is fuel and should be
seen merely as such, I took my pick of food each day, didn't eat the
full amount, and suffered accordingly.
When I'm climbing in the mountains, I'm usually good at getting by on a
couple packets of crisps and chocolate, but that under-eating trick
doesn't work when you're walking day in and day out. So while it's habit
to not eat while walking, I still didn't eat enough, even while making a
conscious effort to always be doing so!
And with in excess of 10 hour days it's also hard to bring out the stove
and cook up a nice meal when the two primary activities are walking and
sleeping.
Neglecting to put the fuel into my body, the body turns to consuming fat
and over the course of five hard days, I lost six kilograms in weight.
(68kgs at the start down to 62kg's by the end) For the future it's
crucial to bring along calories I know I'm going to consume.
Weeks later on the West Highland Way, I lost just half a kilogram,
however conveniences on WHW are much more abundant. SUW is sparse by
comparison, so the following is what we found and used along the way.
We ate fish and chips on our first night (the 2nd) take away from one of
the Portpatrick hotels. Castle Kennedy had a petrol station where we
filled the water bottles from. We didn't bother buying food here for we
were brimming with snacks in the sacks. But the free water was welcome,
as I remember. Beyond Castle Kennedy, there are few or no conveniences
for many kilometres. Some of the locals living on the route between
Laggangarn and Bargrennan offered their outside water taps for walkers.
The 4th June was a hot day, and again the water was much welcomed. We
did not pass through anything resembling a town until Bargrennan and
even this place is just a small collection of houses. I'm unsure what,
if anything, was at Bargrennan - we didn't check anything out and the
map suggests there's not much there anyway.
Once again we headed into the countryside and across to Glen Trool,
finding nothing until the next afternoon in Dalry. Here we found a
couple of newsagents and public toilets (beside the church). It was
enough to be going with. Again there was nothing beyond Dalry until we
came to Sanquhar where we arrived the next evening. Having so often
cooked our own food, it was a novelty to be handing over money and be
given pizza in hand. The pizza wasn't that nice, though Sanquhar has
shops and a cash machine (and probably a lot more we missed), all on the
main street.
Wanlockhead has very little in the way of anything, just houses and (we
were told by one of the locals) a restaurant at the top end of the
village. Beyond there, there was nothing until we came to Moffat. As in
Sanquhar, it felt brilliant that in the cafe's, food should be simply
thrust in front of me without any of my preparation. I don't think I'd
felt this before and certainly not since, but it shows how dislocated we
were from society. We didn't know what was on the news and we ate,
talked and lived independently to everyone else. It actually felt pretty
good. It has plenty downsides, but I realised that I, in some way,
preferred living in our bubble when on June 8th at the walk's conclusion
the news was still circulating that someone in Cumbria had shot several
people dead then I think himself. We missed this news by a few hours
since it occurred when we set off on the 2nd, and we didn't know for
over a week later. When I heard, I'd rather not have known at all and
felt a hint of sadness that I was returning to the connected world.
There's something to be said for living in the moment. As Steve Hogarth
said, we're all
invisible men...
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