We began the day taking the train with Mairi from Irvine to Glasgow. She was on her way to London and then off to Cambodia for 6 months to work for the Red Cross. We continued on the train to Milngavie. Just a side note here: Scottish spellings and pronunciations are quite unrelated to each other. Take our start and endpoint today for example, Milngavie is pronounced Millguy and Drymen is pronounced Drimmin. At first I thought it had something to to do with whisky but I'm pretty sure that the train conductor was sober and that's how he pronounced them.Anyways, we easily found the trailhead in Milngavie, dropped off our bags with the Travel-lite baggage transfer service, and then hit the trail! It had poured rain in Irvine during the night, and we had awoken to still-overcast skies ... not the most promising looking start to our hike, weather-wise. However, the weather gods did favour us with wonderful walking conditions all the way — no rain, intermittent sun, and a nice temperature. Our trail wound gently along through trees, past a golf course, by pastures of sheep or cows, a field of fragrant new-mown hay, and then took us on a short detour to a distillery. We bought a small bottle of 15 year old single malt to help us with our pronunciations. We met a lass on a horse who told us that the "clegs were bad!" We had no idea what she was talking about but we agreed with her anyway. We might need 2 bottles of scotch to get through this trek! As the day went on, the ups felt steeper and the downs less frequent, until 2:30 pm found us in The Clachan Pub in Drymen (the oldest licensed inn in Scotland - 1734) where we rested our tired feet and quenched our thirst, before checking in to our B'n'B across the street.
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