I'm arriving Saturday morning, so after a quick coffee in Glasgow with my parental units, we're down to Ayrshire with Mowgli to pack a car and head North. We're getting good at this..... we're ready to leave by about 2pm.
It's a reduced team, just me and Mowgli. It gives a chance to get excited about Pearl Jam. We're playing various bootlegs and albums all the way up in the car, and our excitemnt levels are through the roof... we're living on a mainline Adrenahlin drip...
The trip is now so common to us, that we are in Glencoe without incident in no time. It;s easter weekend, so the traffic is terrible, but wew just sit in the slow lane of tourists and sing along to our favourite songs.
We're going to camp at glencoe tonight and play guitar, drink red wine and sit at a camp site.... then tomorrow, we'll see what the weather brings... when we arrive the rain is hitting off the car window... As we pay for our tent, I ask the man at the window if he sells sun cream. the humour seems to be lost on him.
It's that really annoying weather... it's not actually raining, but it could at any point, and there's smirry rain in the air, so you get wet just being outside. We pitch the tent anyway and set about trying to start a fire. We have kindling, but the popularoty of the fire means that there is no wood or logs anywhere around. I head off in the car to the local shop...
When I get back Mowgli has the fire going, and I add some extortionatly priced wet logs to the fire. I chop up some ingredients and stick a beef in red wine(vina mara reserva) stew on the gas stove. The rain is drizzling down, but we get the guitar out and sing a few songs anyway.
Although it's raining, I love this setting:
Once it's dark and we've sat and dunked bread into our stew, I chop a few suasages into the pot, add some more wine, and some bacon and cook it for another wee while. Then we pack a bottle of wine for the road and head off into the mountains to get to the closest pub. It's a 2 mile walk or so, but it's great walking along in darkness with only the big onimous mountains surrounding you for company.
We eventually get to the pub. We re-cork our wine and hide it in a bush for the walk back.
The Clachaig Inn is a little old hotel/bar nestled in the middle of the mountains. It dates back to the 16th century, and is pretty much famous as a bar for ale drinking malt whiskey tasting hikers, climbers, bikers and walkers. There's a sign above the door saying "No hawkers or campbells", a reference to the massacre of glencoe.
We enter the bar, and it's clear that this is the only bar for miles. There is no room for breathing.... we squeeze our way through to the bar and order one of the several real ales from the new Atlas Brewery. We have something called a Nimbus:
It's smooth, light and as mowgli describes it... tastes like tropicana.
We make our way to our seats and fin ouselves drinking with some bikers... they tell us the usual biker stories, and we slowly get merry. There's a band playing... a standard pub covers band, but they do manage to pull off some rush covers, which is quite impressive. Before long it's last orders and people start to trickle out the door back to various campsites, youth hostels and hotels. We hop over a fence and retreive our pre-stashed vina mara..... we're such well prepared drunks.
We get back to the campsite and get the fire going again... we tuck into the sausage stew that was left... stewing....and sit up playing some songs with a few of the people we met in the pub...
Once the fire is out... its into the tent for a good nights sleep with the mountains for company.
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