Notes From The TGO Challenge Standby List

I thought I’d treat readers to some pics of LTD’s routine doggy walk, or at least, one of the routes, whilst I expound on me and The Lad’s TGO Challenge application and planning. I’ll keep the progress of the application and the planning up-to-date as things progress. Providing they progress.

For info and bragging tights, the dog walk is 3 miles and 600 feet of ascent. Some doggy walks are a bit longer and some a bit shorter. Whatever the distance and no-matter how many doggy walks take place in a day, LTD always does two poos. And this is why his nickname is “Lautrec”.

So, me and The Lad applied to do the 2017 TGO challenge. This would be my 13th and The Lad’s 3rd. But we’re on the stand-by list. This means that we’re dependant on other people dropping out – either from a bit higher (or is it lower?) on the stand-by list or from the list of participants. So, we’re a bit in limbo although I think we have a moderate chance of getting places.

We have a start point and a finish point – these being Dornie on the West Coast and Dunnotar Castle on the East Coast. The only link between the two places is their castles.

Mrs Pieman is determined to hire a cottage, probably at Johnshaven, to greet us on arrival in the East and, I understand that there’s a tentative plan for Mrs The Lad and The Lad’s family and dog to take the same cottage for the second week…  not sure about this.

I have a plan to buy a bigger tent (more of which later)

So, we need to sort out a route, pending acceptance and plan gear and food and so on. This is standard stuff. I’d like us to go through Braemar and pay a visit to Callater Lodge for the TGO carousing.

Our only strategy, so far, is a determination to do a walk during the TGO chally time – either on the challenge, or at the same time, in the same kind of place, or somewhere else.

And we need a TGO challenge shake-down route – my idea for this is a foot-to-head traverse of the Isle of Man. It’s 35 miles (ish) and should take 2 or 3 days. If we do a walk outside the TGO, it means we can take LTD, which would be good.

And that’s about it. We’re having a family “do” this weekend in the Borders, so some of this detail can be ironed out.

As for LTD- he nearly caught a mouse today in the deeper snow…

In the meantime, I'm using fecking blogger again since the open livewriter software isn't playing.  One could get paranoid about non-google stuff keep breaking, so you could....