Kelvin & Clyde Walkway.
Distance today: 27.8 miles.
Total distance: 390.5 miles.
Accommodation: with friends.
Made the most of my ‘free’ breakfast before heading out. It didn’t take long for me to rediscover my lack of map reading skills, successfully adding another mile or so to the route back to Milngavie. My incompetence continued when I reached the start of the Kelvin Walkway and I struggled to find where to go next. Waymarkers were unhelpfully absent. Luckily I was rescued by someone who happened to be passing by and who then pointed me in the right direction. Once you got out of town, it was then just a case of following the river and so not that complicated. Even for me.
After a few miles of walking along an overgrown path, my feet were sodden but I’d made it to the outskirts of Glasgow. My first big city. No disrespect to Inverness. In fact Glasgow was likely to be the biggest city I passed through on this trip and there was no doubt (in my head at least) it came with a reputation. I’d done a lot of backpacking overseas and I always had a slight nervousness when the place where I first entered a city was not exactly Tourist Central. Moscow springs to mind. The basic question was: am I going to get mugged? And the answer was generally: probably not. Did the fact that I was so obviously not local make me more of a mugging candidate or was that trumped by the fact that I was a scruffy backpacker and therefore unlikely to have anything worth stealing? Certainly when I was travelling abroad, I always felt people knew that I was carrying everything I needed for a long trip and therefore there had to be something worth stealing. All this is a longwinded way of saying that the route seemed to take you through some fairly dodgy areas before you finally reached the municipal parks in the centre.
Another first for the trip – I was staying with friends tonight. Clare, Merghani, and my namesake wee Adam. That was the good news. The bad news was that I had completely underestimated how far it was from Bearsden to where they lived in Uddingston. I made the executive decision not to spend much time in Glasgow (I had planned on hunting down some more dehydrated meals) and also not to join the Clyde Walkway at the very start but at the nearest point to me. Clearly my completist principles were wavering.
I’ll be honest, the section of the Clyde Walkway from central Glasgow to Uddingston is not the prettiest trail I have been on. Credit to the city planners from whatever era for having a park running along the river for quite a stretch but this was a view from a distance, safely behind iron railings. Slightly further along we were back in mugging territory. Further still and we were in countryside-about-to-be-taken-over-by-housing-development territory. Meanwhile, with a distinct lack of waymarkers, the track would occasionally head for the hills before meandering back to the river. My normal 2 mile an hour plod had increased to 3 miles an hour as I tried to reach my destination at a respectable time. I was late, I was tired, and was starting to get very irritated by the whole experience. The final insult was me getting completely lost as I tried to find my way around Uddingston. Add another mile to the kitty.
“Hey, you made it”.
Do not underestimate the therapeutic effects of a bath and a good meal. Even still, I’m not sure I was the best company – in spite of my repertoire of trip stats and anecdotes. Bed was calling.
