Today I walked from our home to Loch Lomond. I get these urges sometimes.
Google Maps had promised a sixteen-mile journey but I walked closer to twenty thanks to my wrong idea that I should to head to the river to get onto the route I had in mind, when I could have just walked west and saved about an hour.
I’m a little out of shape and it took everything I’d got to complete the walk. It stopped being fun around the sixteen-mile mark, and now my legs throb like a pair of throbbing things.
By the time I got to Balloch (the town on the closest shore of the loch), I was more than ready to hop onto the train and go home. But a nerd’s completionism had me walk as if possessed for an extra third of a mile down to the bonnie, bonnie banks so that I might dip my hand in the loch water.
Clearly in a weird conscious state from the too-long walk, I ran the loch water through my hair like some sort of pollution-augmented baptism. I have superpowers now, which is annoying really as I had my heart set on a quiet life of reading and writing.
The sunshine baked me for much of the way but, as you can see from this photograph of the endpoint, the moody clouds closed in, finally bursting as I got home.
At one point on the walk, I saw a future echo. And I was met at the finish line by a lovely lady:
