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[Trail blog is here]

Today was a super long haul.   After leaving Cougie at 8am, we’d opted to take a easy but longer route up and over the ridge going by way of Hilton Lodge. This added 6km that was very easy going.   Today was one of the longer days taking 10 hours of hiking with short breaks.

Our feet really ached having banged out 31km to Ft Augustus.   It felt much longer too as the landscape was pretty boring compared to some of the great scenery of the past few days.  Interestingly we saw lots of Salamanders in mud pools at the summit above Ft Augustus.

As we got towards Fort Augustus, I started to dream about food.   I told Lynn I was thinking about Coconut buns and they looked so good I could almost smell them.   We later realized that Scotch Broom smells like coconut in full bloom.   Yum, it certainly made for an easier last few miles to Ft Augustus.

We were planning on camping tonight but were lured in by the delights of the local B&B.    We stayed at Caledonian Cottage B&B right above the locks which was a delightful little place serving a wonderful cooked breakfast the following morning.    We had a lovely pub dinner at the Loch Inn before jumping into bed for an early night.

Today’s distance was a whopping 31km making 74km total.

On to day 5.