foolfillment: the blog

Well, I’ve moved back into my flat in Glasgow and I’m slowly doing all the boring tidying up that goes with it, this evening I braved opening all the bookmarked blogs that I spent so much of my time reading last year. It’s quite a daunting task, almost as if I’m a new reader, some sites have changed design, and all have too much new content to catch up on but I’m sure I’ll get back into the swing of it when I start back at uni next week. There will also no doubt be more tales of summer holiday adventure along with the chance to win more prizes.

Today though you get to hear of my jaunt in the hills. I was walking for about 5 hours and driving for about the same amount of time which is rubbish. Leaving my flat in Knightswood at 7 and arriving at Stuart and Dan’s flat in Shawlands an hour later did not bode well for a fun day, but still we pushed on and were on the hill (Ben Narnain, near Arrochar) by a quarter to ten.

I’ve been up this hill once before and then as today the intention was to carry on and claim Ben Ime as well but on both occasions one of my companions found the going a bit harder than they had expected and we ended up only getting to the the summit of Ben Narnain, not even popping up The Cobbler as we passed. Even still it was a lovely day and I have lots of photos to prove it. Here’s one of The Cobbler from the top of Ben Narnain

We took loads of rests and were off the hill almost exactly five hours after leaving the car, five hours walking to five hours driving – not the best balance.

I’m still in the middle of scanning my hard drive for photos but picasa from google looks like it might actually be what I’ve been looking for in a photo viewer since I got my digital camera.

From Paris we went right out of France to Germany and the Black Forest. We stepped off our sleeper train onto Heidelberg Station at around half six and found a rather vague and useless map and made our plans of finding the river and having breakfast there before wandering along the river bank towards the old town with it’s castle and bridge (guarded by a rather fetching looking brass monkey) as it happenned we set off in completely the wrong direction for finding the river – exactly parallel with it – we couldn’t have got it much more wrong. By luck we were walking downstream and eventually ended up in the old part of the city and at the river where we finally got our breakfast lunch. Heidelberg proved to less camping friendly than we’d hoped so we hightailed it back to the station and got on the next train to leave. This is when things started to go a bit pear shaped. We used about 5 trains before we got to where we wanted to go, the first time we went through our intended destination we couldn’t get off and when we did get there we walked all the way up the hill to the top of town where the Jugendherberg is only to turn round, go back down and stay in a hotel because the hostel would have been more expensive and by the looks of things was full of screaming little pre-pubescent teenagers.

There is a prize of a ticket for the Paris Metro on offer for the person who gets these questions right : What is the name of the town where we spent the night, what is it’s main tourist attraction, and why did we not get off the train the first time we went through the town.

There will be no more of our tales untill someone gets the right answers. It’s a valid ticket mind, I’m not trying to fob off useless tat onto you and don’t worry if you don’t win this time, there’s more prizes left – look out for three more Metro tickets, 11 Czech Crowns (worth about 22p) and a handful of useless Euro cents. The Euros by the way is the worst currency going, stupid sizes and colours of coins, utterly impossible to count your money without getting it all layed out on a table, a fact that knocks on the head the retarded argument that joining the Euro would make things easier, as if that was a valid argument anyway, grumble grumble…

Answers in the comments box please