Saturday, July 8, 2023 

It’s really hard to leave the apartment this morning. This place has been so perfect. I could easily see moving somewhere like this. But alas, we get the time that we get, so after my chill multi-coffee start, it’s time to say goodbye to our cozy little Fort William home. We have just enough time to pop into one of the shops we missed, and then it’s to the train.

It’s a long journey, but it’s pleasant. We’re basically going backwards along the route I just hiked, and it’s sunny, the trees and mountainsides glowing. Oh. It aches a little bit. There’s Ben Nevis, yet unclimbed, there’s the range we walked through, and then there’s Bridge of Orchy. I can see the route along the train tracks, where Mom came up to meet us a few days ago as we arrived in the not-quite-town. 

“Want to say hi to Helen?” Mom asks, looking at the WHW Sleeper again, fond of her first bunkhouse experience. 

Then, as if manifested out of thin air, Helen walks on the train and sits right behind us. 

Mom turns around. “It’s nice to see you again!”

Helen seems pleasantly surprised, as we are. “Well, hello! Did you have a nice trip?”

“Oh, yes,” Mom replies, at the same time that I say, “It was amazing.” 

After four placid hours of writing, reading, and looking out the windows onto the glens as they turn into neighborhoods and city, we arrive in Glasgow and transfer to our train to Edinburgh. I sleep the entire way there. I’m tired, I guess, and the motion of the train puts me right to sleep. 

When we arrive, the miraculous warm weather is gone, and it’s pouring rain. But it’s okay, because Hermione meets us at the station! No, that’s not her real name, though it suits her extremely well—she got it as her trail name on the AT in 2019 because of her sassy look that strongly evokes Hermione Granger. That, and the fact that she’s English, and there aren’t as many English hikers on the AT as the PCT, so there her accent stood out. 

It’s been four years since I’ve seen her. Our tramilies hiked together a lot in Virginia, and then a bit in Maryland and Pennsylvania, before she had to push ahead a bit due to concerns about her visa running out. She recently got married to Slouch, whom she met hiking the AT. They now live in Cumbria, in far northern England, west of the Lake District and right on the coast. When I mentioned where we’d be traveling on this trip, she volunteered to take the train up to Edinburgh to meet up with us for the weekend. 

It’s so good to see her again after so long. The AT feels like multiple lifetimes ago, and yet, seeing her, it’s made alive again. We hug, start chatting, and head out of Waverly Station and towards the city center. There are immediately so many stairs. It takes a while to get to the top of them in the rain with our packs on, but once we do, we’re right on the Royal Mile, the bustling, insane heart of this ancient city. 

My immediate impression of Edinburgh is that it’s unlike anywhere else I’ve seen. The buildings all look similar, yet have a very distinct character. It’s old, full of personality, and vaguely creepy. The Royal Mile is wide, but all the little streets winding away from it are narrow, steep, and a little more unpredictable. There are also closes, or alleys, that often go through a low archway en route to the street beyond. There’s a sense that there are hidden doors all over this city, thin places, and it would be the easiest thing to accidentally step over a threshold and find yourself in an alternate plane. 

It’s also very chaotic. This is clearly the main part of town and therefore it’s covered in tourists and touristy shops. This will be exciting if it stops raining and when I get my pack off. Herman (for this is what I often called her on the trail) leads us part of the way to our airbnb, dropping off at her hostel. It’s a winding and chaotic journey to where we’re staying, but we get there. 

Mom is convinced that I’ve intentionally been seeking out airbnbs with a lot of stairs. It’s not true, but this once certainly falls into that category once again. It’s on the top floor, which means five flights of dingy, dusty, endless-seeming steps.

The apartment is really interesting. It’s over a hundred years old, and it has lovely creaking floorboards and the walls are painted bright colors. The decorations are a little odd, though, as if the owner was trying to be funky in a good way and ended up just over the edge of funky in a bad way. At first, I like it. I think it has personality. But Mom clearly doesn’t. I ask her why, and she replies, “It gives me the creeps.” 

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. It’s just weird.”

I start to notice some of the stranger decorations, like a small framed painting of a clown in the bathroom and a large amount of mirrors. 

Not long after we arrive at the creepy apartment, we leave again to go meet Hermz for dinner at The Auld Hundred, an adorable little pub on Rose Street. It’s perfect: good food, nice drinks, live music, great company. We catch up on everything in the last four years, which largely constitutes her and Slouch’s journey towards getting married and moving him to the UK, but also covid, an ultramarathon, and her hike of the WHW.

Afterwards, Mom heads back to the apartment (in retrospect, it was mean of me to make her go back there alone) while I go out with Hermione for a few drinks. We first go to Cold City Brewing, which is lovely except for the volume of its DJ, to whose music absolutely no one is dancing. After that we take a little walk up Victoria Streeet, “the cute street,” which Hermione knew I would love. I do indeed! There are so many interesting looking shops! And all the buildings are different colors! We end up at a bar higher up from here that looks down on Victoria. There are about a million people queued up to get into a club. Meanwhile, Hermione and I quietly skip our G&Ts and chat even more. 

Have I established how much I love trail people? We haven’t talked properly since 2019 and yet we slide right back into it. We have that huge life experience in common, and as a result, we will never be strangers. 

I make it back to the creepy apartment just after midnight. Mom’s all good—no ghost sighting, no haunting sounds. By then I’m too tired to be nervous about its odd vibe and just fall right asleep.