TGO Challenge - 2011

This year’s TGO Challenge starts next Friday – for me in Oban.  But the journey actually starts in a few minutes time when I set off with Sue for a weekend at Bridge of Orchy.  I’ll be staying up north after that weekend, doing the TGO Challenge, the planned route of which is shown above, then returning south for a few days on the Devon coastal path.

So the rest of this month’s entries will be via ‘mobile blogging’ – a telephone.

I’ll be doing the Challenge with a carefully selected victim, ‘Poor Michael’, who should know better really as he’s known me for nearly 50 years!  It’s his picture, taken during a practice on Catbells, that you can see on this month’s background image to the blog (I hope readers can see the text more easily than last month, when Lud’s Church was the chosen background).

Our route is described in vivid Technicolor here.  This year I’ve decided not to set up ‘Planned Route’ postings on a day to day basis as they often tend to get out of order due to phone signal problems, etc.  Readers should be able to follow our progress quite easily using the web page, to which I’ll try to provide a link on the daily postings, which may not be daily due to phone signal issues. 

I’ll do my best, though!

Comments will be directed to my phone, so please do keep in touch – I’ll reply by way of observations in the text of the postings, as Gayle does.

The route is a challenging one.  I think that’s the general idea of the TGO Challenge, but it has many options for short cuts and omissions, which I expect to be taken from time to time due to weather and tiredness.

‘Poor Michael’ is very competent in the hills, so we may not stay together all the time if one of us feels better than the other about going high; we are independently self-sufficient.

I’ll finish with the last ‘decent’ image you’ll see for some time over here, the phone images being necessarily of rather low resolution.  It’s a self-timed image taken on last year’s Challenge on the summit of Ben Vrackie.  At least this year I’ll have Mike to take some pictures and avoid the 10 second sprints needed for ones like this!