Post #1 - Scottish National Trail Trip Description and Preparation

Welcome to our Blog!  Ben and I are going on another big adventure this summer.  We had so much fun, and such a great response with our trip to France blog last summer that we decided to do another one when we go to Scotland this summer to walk the first half of the Scottish National Trail.

I think there will be a few questions to start, so I will try and answer them here.

First off, what is the Scottish National Trail?  The Scottish National Trail is an 864 km-long, long- distance walking route running the length of Scotland from Kirk Yetholm, near the southeast border with England, to Cape Wrath, the most northwesterly point on the Scottish mainland.  The trail is broken down into 40 stages varying in length from 9 to 34 km.  Some people do it end to end, some break it down into smaller segments, and some do it one leg at a time over months or years.

Scottish National Trail showing our start and end points.

Why would we want to do this?  I love hiking.  We currently live in one of the best areas of the world for hiking, and we take advantage as much as we can.  Unfortunately, because of other activities in our lives (work, hockey, school, etc.) we usually only get to spend part of a day at a time enjoying it.  When I mentioned this trail to Amanda, she immediately said "You and Ben should go and do it."  Going to Scotland to do this hike will allow us to be outside, doing what we love to do, for 15 full days in a row.

Why Scotland?  A few years ago, I went to Scotland for work.  I was able to convince my Dad to join me for a week prior to the conference I was attending.  It was my first time overseas, and I ended up falling in love with it.  The people were so friendly, and the scenery was spectacular! We did a couple of small hikes while we were there, and when I got home, I couldn't stop myself from thinking that I had to go back and do some more hiking.  When I got home I found a great website: walkhighlands.co.uk.  The site has great trail descriptions and user reports, which were fun to read through.  One day I went into the "Long Distance Walks" section I saw the link for the Scottish National Trail, and have been thinking about it ever since.

How are we going to do it?  To start with I went through the first 20 segments and figured out how to divide them into 14 approximately equal days.  Our average day will do about 27 km of walking.  Right now this seems pretty ambitious but we do plan on doing some serious prep and training in the next few months leading up to June.
We will be bringing camping gear (tent, sleeping bags, Thermarests, stove,water filter, pots and dishes, etc), but will be taking a minimalist approach.  The less we bring, the lighter our packs!  We will spend the majority of nights in a tent, with about four nights in B&B's or hotels.  Day 8 is a rest day with a sleep-in at a hotel, and only 8 km of walking.  With many towns on the route, especially in the first half, we will not have to carry too much food at one time.  Later in the hike we will have to carry two days worth on a couple of occasions.
We have purchased all of our maps and are in the process of marking them up with the different routes.  I have also printed up all of the route descriptions and will laminate them so that if we do get off track it won't be too hard to get back on the right trail.  Ben is going to take some turns being the navigator which will be a good experience for him.

That's about it for our first post.  There probably won't be too many between now and June but I will occasionally provide an update on our prep.  My plan is to post our progress every few days while we are there.  In addition to keeping everybody posted, we found that the blog is an excellent way to document a trip, and is a lot of fun to go back and read after it is over.

Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy!!

JM and Ben