Beautiful Brenda MacConnell and me at the obelisk that marks the beginning of the West Highland Way in Milngavie.

Brenda, Scots born and grown, gave me a stanza of Robert Burns’s poem “Tam O’Shanter” to send me on my way.

A fiddler at the gate…. As I started on the Way, I was serenaded by a fiddler playing Hava Nagila. Pretty amazingly incongruous, but wonderful!

The Thistle in the Hexagon is the new waymark I will be following.

My first camp came after about a 15-mile day on the trail through the Trossachs. It did not rain until we were snug in the tent!