Glencoe Day 1

Posted on July 31, 2011 by Paul

The recent good weather provided the perfect excuse for another trip in the caravan, this time to Glencoe. We’re due to go there later in the year with a group of canicrossers, but this visit was just for us and our two hooligans.

A big chunk of our first day was taken up by the drive (around three hours) and setting up the caravan, but we still found time to revisit a spectacular viewpoint just off the Devil’s Staircase. To reach it, just park in the layby at the start of the Devil’s Staircase and follow the path. When you reach a cairn and the path forks, take the left hand trail to small, cairn-marked peak.

Just beyond the start

The path is clear and easy to follow

And the views are so good..

..that even busy Beagles pause to appreciate them!

Of course if you hang around for too long – especially if it’s after doggy teatime – there can be reprisals.

We headed back down just as the local insect life was getting hungry, and I fully expected to be further eaten alive when got back to the Invercoe campsite. That hadn’t been our first choice of caravan park; it was right by a loch (midge heaven) and seemed to pack an awful lot of pitches into a small area, but it was the only one with spaces. As it turned out, the midges weren’t much of a problem because the site has surprisingly effective anti-midge machines. The close packing of tents and caravans wasn’t great though and we had to work hard to keep Mr. Biggles, our self-appointed security officer, from loudly alerting us and everyone else in the park about anybody carrying a towel, wearing a hat or walking another doggy.

As well as potent midge-eating machines, the Invercoe site had some nice views across the loch.

Glen Trool Assault Course

Posted on July 21, 2011 by Paul

Last weekend we had another Canicross camping trip, this time at Glen Trool. As before we’d lined up a hill walk (up The Merrick of course) and a good long cross country run round the Water of Minnoch for the group’s activities. The latter isn’t one of the conventional, marked trails around Glen Trool so I was keen to sort out any navigational difficulties ahead of the run. To that end, I planned to harness up the pups and walk the route after we’d set up the caravan, and before everyone else arrived.

First though, there was lunch. Susan cooked up some toasties, and we sat down hoping to eat them in a civilized way, which is never easy with two Beagles in such a confined space. It was relatively easy to convince Biggles to settle down next to me, but as usual Beanie was a much tougher nut to crack. When she eventually gave up hope of stealing the toastie off Susan’s plate, she tried for mine, failed, then immediately focused on raiding the still red-hot electric grill on the worktop. I still had my toastie in one hand but I managed to grab Beanie’s collar with my free hand just before she could burn herself. I was very pleased at not only having protected my toastie from Beanie, but also having protected my Beanie from being toasted, and just as I started to say “that was a close one” I heard a decisive “crunch”. Yep, you guessed it, my toastie hand had strayed into Biggles’s strike range and he had taken full advantage. So for me, lunch was short.

After finishing the remaining half of my toastie unmolested, I successfully walked the 7 mile route in the rain, guided by the route description, two Beagle noses and the gps app on my phone. I was now confident that navigation would not be a problem during the run. Other things like bogs, fallen trees and steep hills could still be a problem, and indeed at one point – even at walking pace – I did end up doing a bit of bottom surfing in the mud, but I figured somehow we’d all muddle through on the day.

The first group activity wasn’t the run though, it was a walk up the Merrick. Despite gloomy forecasts we actually got pretty decent weather, but the summit was shrouded in mist. That’s three times we’ve climbed the Merrick, and we still haven’t properly seen the views from the top!

A panorama from just beyond the first hump, twenty minutes or so from the top.

The final day of the trip was reserved for the run, and again the weather gave us surprisingly good conditions: a very light drizzle – just enough to keep us all cool, without getting us soaked. As I’d feared, the hazards on the first part of the trail claimed a few victims; nearly everybody ended up in a ditch at some point, but the group coped admirably with the hills. By the time we all arrived back at the Glen Trool visitor centre we were liberally decorated with mud splats, grazes and insect bites, but everybody seemed to be happy so I’d have to call the venture a success.

I think Beanie & Biggles truly feel at home in our caravan now. Both of them really stretch out when they sleep, and Biggles is becoming a little more tolerant of people wandering close to the caravan, unless they’re wearing a particularly provocative hat!

A muddy tummy is a happy tummy

The Cost of Grapes

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Paul

Last weekend Susan bought what she thought was a very cheap half kilo pack of fresh grapes, but they ended up costing us over £300. The reason for this massively over-inflated price? In a word, Beagles!

The grapes had been stashed right at the back of one of the kitchen worktops, safely out of doggy reach – or so we thought. The thing is, The Bigglet gets very bored when his Mum and Dad are preoccupied with work, and that boredom propels him to new levels of naughtiness. In this case, boredom propelled our pogostick Beagle to the boing of his life, enabling him to snatch said grapes.

A bored little boy snatches a sock from the clothes airer, some days prior to his big score with the grapes

I heard a commotion coming from the kitchen and reluctantly went to investigate, only to find Biggles out on the lawn munching his way through the last of the grapes. Beanie was out there with him, and I suspected she’d managed to down a few of them as well. Grapes are toxic to dogs, and this was of course out of normal vet hours, so after a quick phone consult with a vet nurse we were headed down the motorway to the Glasgow Pets A&E.

Like I said, we knew grapes were toxic to dogs, but until we talked to the A&E vet, we had no idea just how toxic. In some dogs even a handful of grapes could cause renal failure, and by my counting half a kilo is rather more than a handful. Fortunately we got Biggles to the vet well within 2 hours of consumption, and she quickly administered a shot to cause him to vomit up his potentially life-threatening belly banger of a snack. To play it safe Beanie got the magical jag of barfing too. The shots didn’t work immediately – there was a ten to fifteen minute delay which gave the staff just enough to time to bring a pile of old newspapers and a roll of kitchen towel before the fun began.

Biggles was the first to be sick, and as soon as that huge pile of undigested (and incidentally completely unchewed) grapes hit the newspaper, the Beanster lunged right at it to snatch a few. She didn’t succeed, but she got awfully close, and now the vet nurse who was holding her has a better idea of how fast fit Beagles can move. A couple of minutes later though, Beanie was far too busy losing her own lunch to care what Biggles was bringing up.

Neither of our two were keen on being sick on the newspaper we’d laid out for them; they clearly wanted to soil an otherwise clean section of the floor, or maybe one of our shoes, so we had to follow them around with the paper trying to guess where the next payload would hit, all the while being careful not to stand in one we’d missed. It occurred to me that this could be good material for a blockbusting video game. “Beagle Barf Catch” for the Nintendo Wii, anyone?

Anyway, when the vomiting stopped it was clear that poor Beanie hadn’t eaten any grapes, so she’d gone through all that for nothing. Biggles on the other hand had dodged 500g of green bullets. I handed over my credit card and paid the £226 bill, only to be informed that wasn’t quite the end of it; the vet recommended we take The Bigglet for a blood test the next day to make sure there could be no hidden/delayed ill effects from his grape binge. We complied, and this put another £80 on the bill, bringing the grand total to over £300, and that’s without taking the fuel cost into account. So there you go, next time you go to buy grapes, make sure you can afford them!

All things considered, Biggles’ sock habit is considerably cheaper than his grapes habit!