Day 14 - Friday 17th October 2014 Beautiful day outside. A hearty breakfast and warm goodbye to our colourful host. Bag of peat waiting outside. Mad bastard actually did it! Dont want to offend but 3 or 4 KG of extra weight wasnt high on my priority list right now. We wound our way up curvaceous roads with awesome views out over the huge expanse of Atlantic. That began to dominate more and more of our landscape. A Few hours of pleasant country lane walking. Constant clear, crisp blue skies. Coffee stop at a strange desolate hotel with a landlady / owner that reminded me of the character from the Stephen King movie Misery. Another hour of walking in the lanes. Interesting ramshackle houses and huts. Everything rust covered and dilapidated. Everything battered by endless extreme weather. A call to MOD range control at the cape confirmed the end of the NATO exercise and our safe passage through to the lighthouse tomorrow. A lone fighter jet screamed past us at low level before turning 90 degrees upwards towards the heavens. Amazing to see. Some minutes later the same jet passed us again this time in opposite direction - so low you could make out the pilots silhouette against the sky behind in a kind of sign off / good luck boys. Eventually we hung a right along an easy walking path that advertised 4.5 miles to Sandwood Bay - our end destination and camping spot for the night. Easy walking but knees battered so hitting the nurofen. Cicerone stated that sleeping in the sand dunes at Sandwood was a kind of right of passage for Cape Wrath Trail participants and with optimism in the air and the sun bathing everything around us like a spring day we moved on with smiles on our faces. An hour and a half later we rounded a corner to a fairy tale beach. Wide panoramic views. Beautiful. Populated by five or six people max. Day trippers and photographers. Blue and vivid turquoise water. Sand dunes covered in stunning shades of green. Wow. What a finale. Thats what I thought - wrongly assuming the fight was as good as over on the basis that our final day tomorrow was supposed to be a hard but relatively short traverse of the military zone to the cape. Making any assumptions - especially at the eleventh hour - is a foolish and presumptuous mistake to make and I fell for it - greedy for the end. I did my naked skinny jump in the sea as promised for the extra 500 GBP generated and we spent an hour scavenging the treeless beach for driftwood for our campfire later. Eventually we picked what appeared to be a sheltered spot in the dunes and set up tents - making sure all pegs were locked in place with large football sized boulders. It was windy so best not to take any chances. Little did we know that a storm was raging out to sea and was about to slam the west coast of the UK including our highly exposed position on the north west tip of Scotland. We cooked food, hot chocolate, had a laugh around the campfire and passed around a hip flask with guys scotch. Today was a great day. The wind was picking up considerably - sending sparks from our fire in all directions as well as whipping the sand up around us. At 8.30pm I called it a night and turned in. What happened next was terrifying. Ill break it down in my final account.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 10:11:23 +0000
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