West Highland Way - Rowardennan to Ardlui

What a day it has been. My feet have never been so sore, not even after my 12 hour day on Ben Nevis. I have blisters on both feet but that’s not the sorest part, the actual bones of my feet are aching. Today we walked from Rowardennan to Inversnaid and then onwards to Ardlui, which we reached by a cute wee ferry across the top of Loch Lomond. The total was about 19 km. The first half of the walk went very well, I was feeling quite confident and enjoyed the beautiful views of the mountains across the loch. We saw an Osprey plane flying down over the water, with its propellers angled forwards. We got to the Inversnaid Hotel at lunch time. The hotel is currently closed but there are picnic tables outside so we sat and ate our energy bars with coffee in the sunshine. 

It was shortly after this that my troubles began. The second part of the route is very hard going and very rocky in places. Up and down over boulders we climbed, it seemed to go on forever! I was horrified that we were making such slow progress along the loch side. Every now and then the path would open up a bit so that we could stride forward but then more rocks would appear. It was so rough that I was really scared of falling, and in fact we heard from some other walkers that a lady had just fallen right off the path at a tricky bit and broken her ankle; she was rescued by a lifeboat! The path may have been treacherous but to be fair it was also extremely beautiful with steep slopes covered in bluebells, the loch glittering with light, lots of broad leaved wild garlic with its white flowers, and sunlight slanting through the trees. James put Compeed patches on my feet to cover my blisters but the pain was much deeper than that, I have never experienced such foot pain and I can only assume that it resulted from the rough terrain and perhaps I was so tense that I tensed up my feet as well? Who knows, but I was hobbling by the time we eventually arrived at the jetty for the ferry to Ardlui. Not even the famous feral goats could distract me! I felt much better after a shower, a lie down and a slap up dinner in the bar later.