Not quite “blowing a hoolie” as the Scots would say (I hope to be fluent in Scottish words for Scottish weather within the fortnight). However, we’ve had a near constant head wind of ~13 miles (22km) an hour, gusting to 22 miles (36km) an hour all day.

To prove it, here’s my head, in the wind.

At least I didn’t need to use my hairband.

Today was a “20+” day, which does not mean we bemoaned the dire straits that young adults are in regarding housing and jobs currently, as the BBC kindly did this for us this morning already. Plus, our eldest son got his first graduate job just yesterday, so we are still ecstatic with that news.

No, 20+ for us meant 21 miles of walking today. Throughout the 50 walking days, we only have eleven 20+ days, so to encounter our first of these on day 2 arguably could be described as bad planning. However, our late lunch stop at the eerily quiet Lybster proved that finding anywhere to stay between Wick and the cute little pods at Dunbeath Coastal Retreat would have been a challenge. We must have blinked and missed Blackness and the boarded over shops and houses of Lybster bore a striking resemblance to a post-apocalyptic world.

Mark lifted the mood by googling “The Long Walk” to check how fast the contestants had to walk in this film, continuously, to avoid being shot dead. It turns out that although Stephen King wrote the novel when he was only 19 and naive enough to think that 4 miles an hour was a reasonably manageable pace, he requested the pace in the film be changed to 3 miles an hour to provide greater cinematic tension (and for the actors to be able to walk and talk simultaneously no doubt). At an average pace of 3.3 miles an hour we would have been fine until we stopped for a dark fruit Strongbow cider (other ciders are available) on the grassy verge in Lybster. This was courtesy of the local Spar, the only place that was open other than a cafe offering haggis and cheese toasties. Losing the will to live, I didn’t photograph Lybster itself; the most exciting thing we saw just outside Lybster is below, still celebrating their diversity and lying lower than shrubbery to survive being blown away off this granite land.

The rest of the day was spent dodging cars as usual, remarking on the 1 in 100 drivers who seem to aim at us in the hopes that we will magically discover a nearby portal to a more comfortable footpath presumably.

Ironically, after using the only stretch of footpath approximately 500 yards long, we’ve reached Dunbeath, home of Tasty Toes lobster and crab roll shack. Good, but not as good as Cafe Mor in Pembrokeshire, now housed within the Old Point House pub. Certainly not photo worthy.

So, we’ll continue to admire the view from the pod, which does include today’s ubiquitous wind turbines, offshore…

…and this evening’s pizza menu and plan for tomorrow’s walk to Helmsdeep, correction Helmsdale…….