Top of the world

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Pete (seen at the top of Ben Lomond (see Twin Peaks for more climbing stories)

The first Munro of the trip has been bagged (10 June). What type of bag to place over Ben Lomond? A Waitrose bag from Holloway Road of course. Munros are Scottish mountains taller than 3000 feet, catalogued by an anorak called Munro. Ben Lomond is 974 metres (3195 feet) high and the most southerly of Munros. With its twin shoulders and broad head it dominates the eastern shore of Loch Lomond.

There’s a clear path from near the Rowardennan Youth Hostel. This is slightly easier than the Ptarmigan ridge route which Fraser, who runs the hostel, claims to have ascended “barefoot in a kilt”.

It soon offers views of the numerous islands scattered over the loch. There are numerous other climbers, all seemingly discussing departmental office politics with each other. Fellow walkers stop to say “Hiya”, “How ya doin'?” and “Morning!”. It’s a long upwards slog but as you head towards the summit those coming down offer words of encouragement. If only we could apply the mountain code to the city. You might be heading up Highbury Hill to be greeted with comments of “Humid, isn’t it?”, “Not far to go now!” and “I can feel last night’s beer!”.

The walk offers a chance to reflect in silence. Climbing mountains helps you realize the smallness of humans compared to the landscape, the futility of their material aspirations and particularly Sheffield United’s.

Like most mountains Ben Lomond has numerous false summits, my thighs ache, my shirt is saturated with sweat, but the final glimpse of the summit cone speeds exhausted legs. Cloud drifts across the tops and you can feel the dampness on your face. How much better to be in among the clouds feeling them, rather than just flying through.

Occasionally the mist gives way to reveal the full length of the loch, precipitous crags and wild moorland to the east. “Look out for the beasties!” warns a fellow female walker. Bizarrely the summit cone is covered in breeding insects which look like horse flies. The midges have bagged this particular Munro too and make forays for my flesh, but it’s still a shame to leave.

The route down and provides the best snippet of conversation of the day from two ascending Scotsmen. “Stephen wanted to run up a mountain in his kilt to reconnect with his Scottishness…”“Aye, the last person I saw running up a mountain in his kilt was wearing tights underneath to keep the midges off.”

Scotsmen in kilts and tights avoiding midges… surely enough to give anyone a kilt complex.

What a lot of rubbish

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (the pic is taken in Carlisle)

Now that recycling is a part of most people's psyche - or at least with the weekly doorstep collections in London where we live there's no excuse for it not to be - it comes as a HORRIBLE shock to discover how terrible recycling collections are in some parts of the country still.

Obviously reusing is the best option, but lots of people don't seem to have even got recycling...

After the hottest day on record this year (26 degrees) most of the campers crowding Loch Lomond, now a national park, seemed to drive home leaving their rubbish behind. On just one small bay I picked up SIX bags of rubbish, including disposable BBQs, full tins of beans and packets of bacon. As there's no recycling down the long, winding lane to Rowardenan all this gets dumped in landfill. No Australian or Kiwi would do this - in the USA national parks visitors even tupperware their poo out.

It was a relief to find that mountain walkers don't seem to dump litter in the same way - on Skiddaw I found just one sweetie wrapper (yes, I picked it up) and Pete says Ben Lomond was litter free.

Wherever we've gone it's been hard to get rid of the rubbish we've collected. In Argyll & Bute - an area the size of Greater London - the supermarket at Oban has a couple of recycling bins and at Dalmally there are three bottle banks (for clear, green and brown glass) beside cattle crushes that have been unused for so long they have sprouted foxgloves. In the district of Stirling there were no alumnium recycling spots for visitors, cans can only be recycled in the domestic collections. This is mystifying as Scotland has millions of visitors who'll be struggling to get rid of their drinks' containers responsibly.

Further south, in the Lake District, Cockermouth town council allegedly plans to close one of its public glass recycling spots because it's inconvenincing mums on the school run (this sounds so crazy I wonder if I read it right).

None of the big train/bus stations we've been through - Euston, Glasgow, Workington (though it holds the record for being the first UK-purpose built bus station with covered roof!), or Carlisle have recycling facilities either for water bottles or coke cans.

If you are unlucky enough to live in a place where you still struggle to recycle you could try contacting your local Friends of the Earth group http://www.foe.co.uk/ which is sure to be up on what you can do to help sort it out.

Nell loves Highland cows

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nell

"I like Scotland best because it's got Highland Cows."

"I went on a land-rover safari to see all Donald's cows and calves. It took ages to get there and Mummy got wet opening the gate so I got wet too. We saw lots of deer on the way. When we found the cows there was a bull called Seamus. But I like Angus best. He's a bull too, but he's only two years old so he was kept in the barn. And I groomed him."

Go bagpipers

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (pic is of Mairia, Robert and Alasdair)

Hearing the bagpipes is a classic part of the Scottish experience – for the old Duke of Argyll it was also his preferred method of being woken, which offers a novel idea for your phone ring setting.

In the Highlands I met some fantastically talented children, some as young as nine, who play the pipes and drum at competitions. The Inverary & District Pipe Band are trained by a genius piper, Stuart Liddell, but they have to put a huge amount of work in - if your bagpipe isn't played for 15 minutes or so everyday the bag part of the bagpipes (made from a sheep's stomach) goes stiff and the sound just isn't the same...

The band's next big event is the British Championships in Northern Ireland (23 June).

Without the talent of children in bands like the Inverary & District Pipe Band visitors to Scotland would have to fall back on elevator tape tunes and the rather cheesy settings provided by busking pipers in tourist car parks next to Glencoe or Culloden battlefield. To see the bagpipes expertly played look out for the local celidhs, at the Highland shows, one-off dates at various caravan/camping sites and the hotels.

Bat in the dining room

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola

Just as it finally turns dark and the main course dishes are being cleared a bat spins into the dining room. The pipistrelle circulates round and round the central light avoiding hats, heads and big hair despite its speedy motion. Nothing seems to be able to get it to leave, and its speed is making all of us whoozy. Nell, sitting on my lap because she can’t get back to sleep, is transfixed by the bat. She is convinced that it is related to the swallow, nesting in the porch, which flew in while dinner was being made.

The animals have gone crazy today. There were so many midges in the dining room before the 11 of us renting the shooting lodge sat down to dinner that they had to be removed with an industrial vacuum cleaner. I guess they’ve set up home inside it now which will be an unpleasant shock for the unfortunate person who gets to empty it.

My brother had to stop casting for 10 minutes when a wren landed on his rod. Not much later a buzzard came hunting down the river banks – something he’d never seen before. At the same moment, 20 miles away, (spooky eh?) I was admiring the route Lola and I had just covered on our taster walk along the West Highland Way when a chaffinch flew on to my map and wobbled there so long that Lola was able to finish the ice cream cone she was enjoying (and she’s the slowest eater I know). I can now tell you with authority that male chaffinches are very pretty – puffed out pink chests and blue grey vests, some even have eye markings that look as if they are wearing dark glasses.

We've climbed Mount Everest

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola (pic shows our caterpillar friends)

The huge mountain dominating the Lakeland town of Keswick is Skiddaw. Unlike most mountains you don’t need a map up as there’s an easy path to the summit. But the route still climbs a massive 931 metres high (more than 3,000 feet). Over the past year our family has made several unsuccessful attempts to climb it – only to be driven back by rain, cloud, connecting bus links and a mystery vomiting outbreak. No wonder we think of this mountain as the most challenging in the world, Everest.

Weather conditions were perfect: cool and clear on the fell slopes and up at the top enough whispy cloud and freezing wind to know you are just about at the top of Britain. The girls powered up using pear drops (lola) and minstrels (nell). Fabulous distractions included fell runners (training to complete 43 peaks in 24 hours…), plus chats with a fit woman who had recently coaxed her five-year-old up Snowdon in Wales, a Dutch couple wheeling their pram down the mountain and anyone with a dog.

Yet again the animals were stars. On the way up it was the Herdwick sheep (a Lakeland breed) which helped lure the kids towards the summit, and just when we were in the “death zone” – that bit at the top where logic says turn back, but emotions insist you must go on even if it’s certain death to continue (think Mallory in his tweeds on Everest) the caterpillars turned up.

This month only on the highest slopes of Skiddaw (and apparently Hellvelyn too) there are thousands, maybe millions, of brown striped antler moth caterpillars chomping through the grassy hillside. It’s a phenomenon that occurs once a decade – utterly amazing to see until you get blasé about the quantities. The girls gave several a hitch-hike in their wooly hats (Catriona, Katya and the singer/songwriter Cat Stephens) up the slopes until they were suitably disgusted by the discovery that caterpillars do many green dot poos.

After three and a half hours Lola bagged the summit first, Pete at the tail end. As Nell pointed out this was because he was so busy “talking to dragons”. Lola who is developing a penchant for sarcasm added that he only talked to the ones in claret and blue…

If you want to climb a mountain with kids then this is the one. Or hedge your bets and go up Snowdon which has a train service to the top, and a café! All the training you need is the daily walk to school…

Fishing records

Nicola, Pete, Lola and Nell want to travel the world with a difference. We hope to get a taste of many countries without adding to climate change (with needless emissions from aeroplanes) or having to waste hours of holiday time in airport terminals. We hope our adventures inspire you to take a Grand Tour of your neighbourhood. This post is from Nicola

11 June 2007: Today, fourteen years ago, my dad rescued a German tourist from certain death near the Devil’s Pulpit. Despite having to forego a few minutes of his precious casting time Dad managed to throw a lifeline to the man who had slipped on these notorious rocks and fallen into a treacherous bit of the River Orchy.

The incident is recorded in the blue leather bound estate fishing book kept in the bothy used by salmon fishermen. Most of the entries detail which fly was used, which spot proved successful and condition of the hen/cock (fish) as it comes up to spawn, but on this particular day Dad wrote: “Fresh German. No sea lice.” The weight – 150lb – might also be a give away. Sitting in the bothy with it's whisky-history atmosphere I can imagine my Dad’s wicked expression as he made this entry in such a splendidly deadpan manner.