It seemed like everyone in the world has had their own BBQ except us, so one slightly warmer afternoon last week we decided to give it a go. We went for a charcoal burning model, on the grounds that it was less likely to explode if we mucked it up somehow. Assembly took a little longer than expected. The instructions weren’t exactly clear (they were even harder to follow after Biggles ran off with them) but I succeeded in building something that looked like the picture on the box. We put our folding metal playpen round the thing for extra doggy-safety, loaded up the coals and lighter cubes, lit the blue touch paper and stood well back. Biggles stood even further back, because he has a thing about cooking. He’s not scared of the sound of power tools or even the vacuum cleaner (known in our house as the Sniffy Monster) but smokey cooking always makes him leg it. Beanie on the other hand is normally a scaredy cat but on this occasion she stayed quite close. Maybe she figured she had a chance of grabbing some raw burger.

I’m not scared, you understand, but.. I think I’ll just watch from here…

The lighter cubes burned out, but the charcoal wasn’t glowing and there wasn’t much heat coming from it. We rebuilt our charcoal pyramid, threw more lighter cubes into the middle and lit them up a second time. Still no joy. The instructions said it could take half an hour for them to reach cooking temperature, but we’d now been waiting nearly an hour by now. The late afternoon sun was leaving our garden and the temperature was dropping. Still, it would be nice and warm once the barbecue got going. We tried again. And again. Still our burgers had more chance of cooking in the tumble dryer than on our barbie.

Determined not to be beaten I went inside to ask Google for advice. It was nice and warm in the house, and as I passed through the kitchen on my way to the office I couldn’t help but glance at our cooker, which was perfectly capable of giving us hot, well cooked burgers without any charcoal, lighter cubes or ridiculously long waiting time. Google gave me the answer I needed – the charcoal should be on a grill a centimeter or two above the base of the ash box, not sitting directly on the base. To be fair I had wondered what that extra grill was for! I headed back outside to try again and about 45 minutes later we were sitting on the deck in failing light and shivering in a cold wind, with apparently cooked yet not particularly warm burgers in our hands. To make the most of the experience we finished by toasting a few marshmallows (they burn better than the lighter cubes!), then sought refuge in our warm house with our two thoroughly bored Beagles.

The next day we fancied a short but energetic hill climb with a nice view. A little searching turned up the Byne Hill walk in Girvan. It was just the ticket! We got to the car park that marks the start of the walk easily enough, but after that the directions didn’t seem too clear. The road we were apparently supposed to take hit a dead end down a farm road, so we tried the other direction and went down by the Byne Hill Cemetery. This didn’t seem to offer any opportunities for climbing the hill, so we did an about turn and revisited the farm road. Maybe we’d missed a path leading off the road (it wouldn’t be the first time!) Nope, definitely no hidden path. We turned round and went down past the cemetery (again) – I’d spotted a caravan park there and figured maybe one of the residents would know how to get access to the hill. We got lucky, and armed with directions we headed through the caravan park, past the cemetery again (again) and.. hit another dead end. We retraced our steps past the cemetery again (again again) and found someone else with a different idea of how to finally get up Byne Hill. This also ended in failure, but gave us another couple of chances to view the blummin’ cemetery, which is obviously Girvan’s main attraction. The walk up the hill was supposed to be around 6.5 km long. We’d already walked about 4 km going back and forth by the graveyard, so we admitted defeat and settled for a stroll along the beach. We subsequently discovered that the directions for the walk were simply out of date – the route did indeed go down the farm road but that road together all other routes to the base of the hill were now closed to walkers. Just to complete the whole dead-end experience, the main road out of Girvan was also closed.

The Byne Hill cemetery. It’s very nice, but I wouldn’t want to spend a whole day there (again)

The cani-x race around Glentress forest gave us a thirst for a good long forest walk. We considered going back to Glentress, but it’s a long drive so we looked for something closer to home. We found it: Galloway Forest Park, a huge (300 square miles!) chunk of Scottish countryside complete with hills, lakes and forests. We decided to start out at the Glentrool visitor center and try out some of the signposted walks around there.

The Glentrool visitor center

Glentrool has four color-coded walks. A couple of them are ridiculously short, but two of them are a decent length – the yellow one which loops through the forest, and the green one which loops round Loch Trool and takes in a large stone monument commemorating Robert The Bruce’s success against the English. The green trail was the longest, but the yellow trail claimed to have some great views and departed directly from the visitor center, so that’s the one we chose.

The walk is supposed to be physically challenging and take around 2.5 hours to complete, but after about 35 minutes we were half way round it, in the car park that marks the start of the longer green trail. Don’t get me wrong – it had been a pleasant enough walk up to that point, but the only real challenges were (1) trying to keep the occasional frog from becoming a Beagle snack and (2) holding on to Biggles whenever his nose found a tempting scent.

Luckily we saw this little fella before Beanie & Biggles

A little clip from the forest walk – can you hear the gentle sounds of nature? No you can’t, ‘cos Biggles is aaarrfing his head off again.

To get more of a workout we decided to do the green trail then return to the visitor center via the second half of the yellow trail. Adding up the distances from map, that should have given us a walk of around 10 miles, getting us back at the visitor center shop safely before closing time (I figured I’d be due a seriously big ice cream by then). It was a good move, because the green trail was a much more satisfying walk and had some lovely views.

Bruce’s stone: it looks nice…

…but it’s way too big to carry around in your mouth.

The view from the monument site

It was a much harder walk than the yellow trail (despite the visitor center map’s claims to the contrary) and we all needed a few drink breaks..

..but we finished it with an hour and a half to go before the shop was due to close. In other words, we had 90 minutes to walk the second half of the yellow trail before the ice cream “window” closed. Easy!

We looked around for the markers for the rest of the yellow trail, and though we didn’t see them,  the way forward seemed pretty obvious. Beanie & Biggles were as eager to carry on as ever, and though we were feeling a little tired and hungry at this point, we set a good pace. There was no way I was going to miss my post-walk ice cream. After a time we became concerned that we hadn’t passed any yellow route markers, but the path was really obvious so we guessed they just weren’t needed. Somewhat further on we hit  a crossroads – and there was no yellow marker to show us the right way to go.  We followed what appeared to be the natural continuation of the trail. I checked my watch and found we’d already been walking for 45 minutes. I was kind of surprised that we hadn’t made it back to the visitor center in that time. It was probably just around the next corner. We quickened our pace, something that Beanie & Biggles really appreciated, because we’d been going far too slow for them up to that point. Another few corners on and there was still no sign of the visitor center. Surely we hadn’t taken a wrong turning?

Many, many moons ago I ended up doing a short course on economics. About the only thing I remember from it was the “sunk cost fallacy”. Basically, it’s human nature to keep going with a thing once you’ve invested a lot in it, because you don’t want to throw away that investment, and anyway a big win might be coming up any time , right? That’s the fallacy, because what’s lost is lost; throwing more resources at a losing proposition just increases the final cost. I really, really wish I’d paid heed to sunk cost fallacy instead of trudging further along the wrong track for another half hour.

The shop was now shut, and the only way to get back to the car was to retrace our steps all the way back to the end of the green trail and try to find the second half of the yellow trail. That’s what we did, and it took a blummin’ long time! As it turned out the yellow trail was clearly marked. It takes a special kind of idiot to get lost when they’ve got a map and the trail is well marked, but that’s the kind of idiot I am. Maybe Biggles’ recently acquired brain cells fell out of my head, not Beanie’s.