The ten of us really looked quite spiffing with all (but one) of our faces painted. The vibrant face paint complimented the hi-vis colours of our hiking gear. The Grocer and Gazza wore matching luminous green jackets. The jackets said “guide” on them, but the two lads weren’t guides. They just bought the jackets to look cool. Gazza is big and the Grocer is little; they looked like a parody of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito in Twins. It was very cute.

The rest of us didn’t think to wear matching outfits. All the ladies wore wearing pink (so did RedBeard). Ms NornIron even wore a pink Pippi LongStocking hat that she had knitted while waiting for us to turn up. The Rabbit of Infinite T-Shirts wore infinite t-shirts.

Once the team had been gathered, watered, fed and painted, we tried to get on a bus to the start point. Rather than wait in line with everyone else, we tried to skip the queues to get an earlier bus. Our argument was clear: “there are lots of us together, so…, eh… please??” It didn’t work. We went back to queuing and got the second last bus a few minutes later.

One of the organisers made a speech after we boarded the bus. He thanked us profusely for our support, gave us some instructions for the trail and wished us the best. He told us the evening’s fundraising was to fund a mobile command unit for the Mountain Rescue team. For each rescue call-out, the MCU would be deployed immediately to coordinate and manage the rescue resources on the ground. I immediately thought of Thunderbirds. I looked eagerly to see if the roof of the pub would split in two and a brightly coloured jet/rocket/hovercraft would launch from a secret underground hanger. It didn’t.

The box of pink coconut mini-macaroons was passed around on the bus. The lads even offered mini-muffins to all the strangers who were on the bus with us; it’s that type of event. I was sitting at the back of the bus, so I used my head torch to light everything. My torch meant that people could see each other and see the box of macaroons. I was very helpful. I still only got one macaroon.

The conversation on the bus was about climbing adventures. The Grocer and Gazza talked about their adventures on Mont Blanc (4,810m) where they had bought their matching guide jackets (they weren’t guides there either). RedBeard mentioned that he’d found leopard prints* outside his tent while climbing Mount Kenya (5,199m). I thought it was relevant to mention that I had seen no leopards while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro (5,895m). Everyone was silent for a moment, until Paleface chirped up and told us about climbing Island Peak (6, 189m). Some people are terrible story-toppers.

When we started walking, I saw that a few of the group ahead of us had sea shells on their bags, a sign that they’d walked the Camino de Santiago. I got chatting to them about it. The girl I was talking too had started from just before Astorga and stopped in Santiago (about 200km). I told her proudly that I had walked from St Jean Pied de Port through Santiago and all the way to Finisterre (about 900km). Then Paleface butted in and told how he walked from St Jean to Finisterre, from there on to Muxia, then back to Santiago (about 1,000km), and finally he took a bus to the Portuguese border, so he could walk back from there. Some people are terrible story-toppers.

We also caught up on our respect social and working lives. People talked about wives and girlfriends. I thought I’d do The Grocer a favour by telling everyone about all the different times he got engaged. Apparently that was inappropriate. It turns out we weren’t playing the story-topping game anymore.

We’re thinking of climbing a mountain together next year or the year after. If we all climb the same one, we won’t have to story-top each other anymore. We’ll just story-top the people who aren’t there. We’re thinking about Aconcagua in Argentina (6,961m). It requires a three-week stay on the mountain, staying in flimsy tents in freezing conditions, carrying heavy packs and struggling to breathe the very thin air, but we’re all okay with that. Then we were told we would need to carry our own poo down the mountain when we leave. We’re reconsidering.

The walk started high in the Wicklow Gap above Glendalough. In the floodlights, the bare rocky starting area looked like the surface of the moon. It was very atmospheric and moving. We argued about which team was which and who should carry the tickets. As we all acted like children, Lady Captain reluctantly agreed to continue being in-charge of everyone and tucked the tickets away in her soft-shell.

All of the volunteers helping out on the walk were very friendly and grateful. Even as they stood in the dark, waiting in the cold and listening to our squabbling, they thanked us for turning up. They acted as if we were doing them a favour. It was quite lovely to be made feel so welcome. They had marked the path with glow sticks and luminous flags so we couldn’t get lost (although Ms NornIron gave it a go). After ten minutes we passed a lone tree decorated with glow sticks. It looked almost Christmassy. Everyone thought it was a very nice gesture. I wonder if someone just got bored and threw all their glow sticks in one spot. If so, it worked.

We arrived into Glendalough Valley from the back. It was like sneaking into someone’s back garden. We came down an empty laneway, up some steps and through a back gate into the graveyard. A dry-ice machine pumped out spooky fog, in case the dark night in the medieval graveyard under a full moon wasn’t atmospheric enough. As we walked through the eerie graveyard, Gappy thought she felt a felt a power touching her. I suspect Gazza.

The first check-in was a large inflatable white bubble beside the upper lake. We had another moment of confusing about who was in whose team and we were served muffins. The Grocer spent some time adjusting his buff to make sure he got the right look. He finally settled on gay pirate. It suited him.

*actual paw prints from a big hunting cat, not his own discarded underwear.