After spending three weeks in Norway, we opted for a bit of a change and came to Scotland. Instead of the omnipresent driving rain showers of Bergen, we got the omnipresent soft rain showers of Scotland. Instead of the people around us speaking Norwegian that we could not understand, we got Highlanders speaking English that we could not understand. However, our two weeks in Braemar on the outskirts of the Cairngorms National Park were wonderful and not nearly enough time to explore this wonderful land of stunning vistas, friendly people, and myths and mysteries (such as: how can the words "haggis" and "bonbon" possibly be used in the same sentence to describe a single menu item?)
We managed to do enough in our two weeks to warrant more than one blog post so in this post we will focus on the bigger hike we did into the Cairngorms during our time there. In the next post we will show you more of the town itself and the various things is has on offer (hint: whiskey features prominently in that one!).
We chose the town of Braemar for its location on the Dee River at the entrance to Cairngorms National Park. The Cairngorms are the largest national park in the UK and we've always been intrigued and wanting to visit it. Not knowing much about Braemar, it seemed like it would be a lovely small town that would be a fun place to hang out for a couple of weeks while making forays into some of the most beautiful wilderness the UK has to offer. And was it? Bingo! We win again!
With the juggling of our work responsibilities, we planned to devote the one free weekend we had to doing a longer hike than the beautiful short hikes around Braemar we were doing every day. We settled on doing a 15 mile hike that got us to the top of a munro (in the UK a munro is a mountain over 3K feet) named Cairne Mehaim (which somehow gets pronounced "Karn-a Vey-him" around here; where the 'v' comes from is another mystery). This turned out to be a great decision, as it provided commanding 360-degree views including over to its neighbor Ben MacDui, which is the second-highest mountain in the UK.
Enough with the background! Suffice it to say it was an awesome day of hiking, the sun came out and shone on us and we were mostly alone in some of the most beautiful lands either of us have ever seen.
The hike starts by following the Dee river up into its source in the mountains, before climbing up.
The views from the top were just outstanding.
Nothing like a mountain nap in the sunshine!
Next time we will show you more of Braemar itself and some of the fun and interesting things we did there!