Sabine posing on the summit of Ben Nevis (highest mountain in Scotland).

This photo was chosen at random from one of my flash cards. I can’t download anything to my computer until I free up hard drive space, but I’ve got several other projects that I need to finish first, unfortunately.

We were so unbelievably lucky with the weather! For the whole 3 weeks, we had no more than about 3 hours of rain, total, and way more than our share of sunny blue skies (albeit a bit hazy a lot of the time). The days were so long, with the sun heading down a bit after 10pm and the morning starting all too early! On some of our hikes I was even complaining that it was too hot and I shouldn’t need to wear sunblock in Scotland. After about a week of sunshine and temps in the 70’s it was pretty funny to see about half the locals walking around with sunburns.

I think we managed to find just about every tick in Scotland. Each night, just before bed, we would have our “tick check.” So one night, Sabine found one crawling up my leg, and then another one on my other leg. This led me to check my shoes, where upon I found about 7-8 more. Then I checked my pants where a few more turned up, and then we found a few more crawling around the van on and on my camera case. All in all, we spent about an hour, searching the van at midnight with our headlamps looking for ticks. They are actually easier to find at night because they are a bit shiny and will reflect in the light, but most of them were so unbelievably small, often no larger than a pinhead, that we didn’t want to think about how many we couldn’t find. Then next morning we took just about everything out of the van, finding another 5-6. So all and all, for this one incident, we came up with about 30 ticks! Awful. This happened in the middle of the trip, so we spent the second half completely paranoid and checked ourselves religiously whenever we got into the van. And even being quite careful, on a short little walk (about 20 feet) to the edge of a cliff, I managed to collect 7 on my shoes and pants.

And due to the mild winter here in Europe, Germany is predicted to have a large amount of ticks this summer. I already managed to get the first one on Saturday (less than 24 hours since getting back) while out climbing.