WHW Day 3: Rowardennan to Crianlarich

Another day, another cooked breakfast! This time brekky was at the Rowardennan hotel- after crawling from our beds much later than we should, we strolled across to the hotel and mixed with cushy non walkers. Our comfort was quite shortlived, however!

We had meant to walk an easy way for the first section of the walk - there was a part of the trail next to Loch Lomond that our guidebook described quite harshly - however it turned out that we missed the turnoff to the easy section... and what a start for a 20-mile day!

The trail was over boulders, around trees, up and down next to the loch... all very beautiful, but time consuming too! We did manage to make quite a good pace along and towards Rob Roy's cave... which we didn't bother exploring. We still had too far to go to explore that part of the local history!

Some of the local scenery found us though. A little down the path from the cave, Stephan mentioned "I wonder what kind of animals they have here? Smells like some kind of beast"... turns out that the next corner we rounded there was a huuge mountain goat vegging next to the path - and eyeing us warily. Some beast :-)

Another mile or two and at 1pm we arrived at Inversnaid, a hotel that actually made use of the scenery! After a photo or two and time to scowl at the other walkers who were staying for lunch, we headed off for our lunch stop - another 6 1/2 miles!

We reached the top of Loch Lomond and veered East. We were on a mission - to head for the Drover's Inn. And what a place! The entrance has stuffed bears, game birds and a suit of armour, while inside the pub the atmosphere was excellent - unfortunately they were renovating their kitchen, so we had to eat at the "Stagger Inn" across the road - which was quite aptly named. mmm gammon steak :-)

We popped back to the Drover's after lunch, but it turned out not to be a GBG listed pub :-( So just normal beers and time to work out how to wash soap off your hands when the toilet taps don't work. Still not sure how Stephan managed it...

We still had another 7 miles until dinner! We donned waterproofs and trudged through the rain, finishing with a walk through a dark spooky wood before reaching Crianlarich. It was 8:15pm by the time we got to the hostel, where we had to rush about and zip down to the local pub before they stopped serving food! It ended up being quite tasty, and we even managed to finish with a pub crawl - we ended up visitng *both* of the town's pubs :-)

Even managed to leave a "South London Walking Club" message there and finish with a whiskey. Just what the doctor ordered :-)

Posted by Sam at June 14, 2005 11:46 PM