So, we’ve walked back into the city that we left on the bus that took less than 7 hours to go to the place we left 7 days ago. Go us – what an achievement. It’s a stark realisation that before motorised transport was developed you needed a really good reason to move between places, very likely because the place you were moving from had nothing more than a signpost and a gift shop and you needed to trade a load of scented candles for something you actually needed to survive.

So here we are in Inverness on our first day of RESssssst………….which has not been restful at all. Last night, as we were craving food that was not battered and deep fried, we walked the 2 miles from our guest house back into town so that we could eat at an Indian curry house rather than the local golf course. I had squid makhani and Mark had Himalayan dry chicken. I sincerely hope this is the last time in my life I have battered and deep fried calamari in a congealed sauce with a mild hint of chilli, despite requesting “hot level of spice please”. Mark’s chicken was battered and deep fried and my salmon starter was battered and deep fried, (to be fair that was a pakora, so I was expecting that). I think Inverness at some point in its history has been entirely battered and deep fried.

Today has been a day of planning five key things:

1. Having mapped out the entire route from John O Groats to Lands End, I’m not sure one day has gone to plan yet. The A9 and A82 through Scotland are great if you’re in a car, and equally great if you want to get squished between a lorry and a wall of granite as a pedestrian. This is not in our life plan as we start retirement, so we’ve been tweaking the route as we go, but the Great Glen Way through the  Highlands is not something you can “tweak”. According to a reliable source, “The Scottish Highlands were formed between 480 million and 400 million years ago through continental plate collisions, intense heat and pressure, and later shaping by ice ages“. According to the guesthouse owner in Golspie, nothing has changed to the land since then. This is not something you mess with lightly. So now we are destined to spend every one of the next 10 days (no longer 9) walking to Glasgow. Our route takes us through some of the most beautiful parts of Scotland, alongside stunning lochs, over those dramatic forged hills and through lush valleys. Spoiler alert, I will be mostly whinging about the hills.

2. In the meantime we have also posted back some clothes we think we won’t wear, to lighten our backpacks. Disappointingly, we’ve only shed a quarter of the weight we started with, but as Mark’s rucksack empty is ridiculously heavy I’m hoping my back pack is as light as a feather tomorrow.

3. We’ve also had a phone conversation with our electrician, builder and someone making a light box around a stained glass panel for us at home. Thanks to a friend dropping into our lodge at a critical moment when the landing, hall and stairwell were being scrutinised by both a builder and staircase designer simultaneously, it looks like the loft conversion has not veered off plan, in contrast to our route.

4. We needed to wash our clothes from the last week in one of Inverness’ many laundrettes; taking us back to our student days of working out how to work a washing machine and dryer we’ve never seen before in our lives.

5. Finally, as we have reached a town large enough to have a post office to send things back home, it is also large enough to have a cinema to satisfy Mark’s craving to watch a film. We got super excited about our youngest son moving to a new town recently and for his birthday on Saturday, we wanted to help him make new friends by buying him a cinema ticket for two people. Our youngest son has inherited his mum’s extraversion and he’s already found people to go with and so has reported that the film we’re going to watch is “long”. With a review like that, who could wait to see the new Spiderman film? No spoiler alerts – it was all very life affirming and a good way to spend our last few hours in Inverness.

My reflections on this city are that in general I will not rush back to see it a third time. It is a city of contradictions: it has historical claims everywhere you go, yet the oldest pub has nothing on the average Bath stone property.

Low cost shops abound, reflecting the government’s inclusion of Inverness for “levelling up” funding.

I fully expected this region to have a significantly lower median salary than southern UK, however it is identical to the south east of England and the costs we have paid for food and drinks seem to reflect this.

Yet there are some gems. In the Black Isle Bar and Rooms, the wood oven baked pizzas were delicious and the first example of somewhere we have seen taking advantage of exceptional local produce (and proving that you can put black pudding on top of everything as well as haggis). Signs everywhere proudly announced their carbon neutral status as men with top knots drank organic beer between dashes to the gender neutral bathrooms. It was a civilised and modern world away from the woman Mark saw more of than he bargained for, as she bent down in the launderette half undressed.

So back at our guest house for a welcome nightcap, here’s to the next stage and the Great Glen Way……

Distance – 0 official kms, too many actual ones