By Burly
Given that I'm sitting around the flat bored I thought I'd knock up a short trip report for the Braedownie meet.
We were promised an indian summer with a hut just across the road from a wide variety of rock climbing routes. Unfortunately while everywhere south of the Lake District appeared to enjoy an indian summer the Cairngorms were enjoying two days of solid rain (the second of which wasn't even forecast when we left Glasgow). This meant no climbing and quite a few disappointed people as the meet was well attended and well organised by Martin.
With everything wet and rain continuing through the night into the morning everyone opted for a walk. Those who were just up for the Saturday went off on a shorter walk, the rest of us went in search of Tolmount and Tom Buidhe. It'd be fair to say that it was very wet, so wet that we even popped into the emergency shelter for a bit, just to get out of the heavy rain. At this point we left the path to head for the first summit. Mark was doing an excellent job of navigating at the front, unfortunately the cloud meant that the people at the back of the line couldn't see those at the front. The plan was to take a straight line up the mountain but the small stream was actually quite a big river and we had to walk several kilometers upstream before we got to a suitable crossing point.
That done, the first summit fell very quickly and the second shortly after. Scapa got his coat on then we all started the walk back down. I was certainly quite wet by this point and I think at various stages on the way everyone started to get soaked through. Nevertheless, after walking out we all cooked some food before settling down to Martin's beer tasting evening.
This was quite an interesting experiment: 10 beers, all well known brands, tasted blind. Simply give them a score and identify the beer by taste. Easy you might think. The highest match was 2 out of 10! Clearly we need to drink more as a club. Budvar came out top and Corona came bottom, beat by an alcohol free beer. Otherwise things were mostly in the order you would expect. What we did learn is that Kevin either hates or loves beer scoring everything as 0, 1, 2 or 8,9 it seemed. There is no in between!
Sunday brought more rain and a walk up Broad Cairn for the majority with Mark giving the new members, Lisa and Katerina (sp?), a lesson in navigation. It wasn't a particularly inspiring walk, but then it wasn't particularly inspiring weather. Up and down, then everyone returned home to Glasgow with a couple of us stopping of in the pub for food. Kevin and Karin decided they'd rather go and run over a couple of mountains, I think, so we left them to that.