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Day 13 - have you got the car keys?

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Last post for anyone who's still with us!! A stressful last day since we found out at about 8.30 last night that our train today from Perth to Glasgow had been cancelled along with our reserved bike spaces. There followed 90 minutes of trying to get through to someone at Scotrail, a restless night's sleep, more phone calls in the morning and then getting to the station at Inverness early to see if they could help. The end result was that we changed to an earlier train (plus bikes spaces) from Perth, but with only 15 minutes rather than the original hour between our train from Inverness arriving and our train for Glasgow leaving. As you can imagine all sorts of things could have gone wrong, but it all worked out fine with the connections and we got from Inverness to Perth to Glasgow earlier than originally planned.  That left our last bike ride of the holiday, just ten miles from Glasgow Queen Street station to Glasgow Airport Long Stay Car Pa...
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Day 12 - another night, another B&B

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Not much to report. On reflection, choosing a B&B just by the side of one of the main A roads into Inverness wasn't our best decision, but in our defence, there weren't many  alternatives available when we booked. From there, it was just a stone's throw or 23 miles to be more precise, through some lovely lush, green countryside into the centre of Inverness to our next overnight stay. The A835 into Inverness doesn't have a good reputation among cyclists, being quite busy and narrow, but we found alternatives to much of it and where there were no alternatives, there was a shared cyclist/pedestrian path which was safe enough. The landlady (our last before getting home) very kindly let us check-in early, so we dumped our stuff, showered and changed before chilling in Inverness (including the Inverness Botanical Gardens) for the rest of the day. Balanced scorecard (0-10) Total miles cycled 323 (316 for Lesley) Wetness level 0 Stress le...
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Day 11 - home beckons

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There's no great way to get from Ullapool to Inverness by bike. We choose the A538 which is a fairly main road and was OK for most of the route with not too much traffic. As you can see from the elevation profile below, miles 8-18 were mainly uphill but that was more than made up for by miles 18-35 being mainly downhill. Lesley was very pleased that the gradients were nowhere near as bad as the picture suggests and even more pleased I didn't show her the elevation profile before we set off. We broke up the ascent by visiting Corrieshalloch Gorge, the deepest glacial meltwater gorge in the UK which was very impressive. We broke up the descent by a pub stop and a sightseeing stop at the Black Water Falls, again very pretty and picturesque which would have been a great place for a picnic if we hadn't eaten already. It seems to be a rule of cycling that wherever you stop for lunch, there's a better place to stop half a mile down the road....
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Day 10 - what are the chances of that?

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As they say, it's a small world, which was amply proved this evening when Lesley and I ended up in a restaurant for dinner on a table next to Ian Hamer who I went to Bolton School with. Ian is with a group cycling the Scotland NC500. I would love to say that my average speed and average daily distance were comparable to his, but athletically, we were always worlds apart. Part of our discussion was about logistics which is always one of the challenges on holidays like this and is why many people choose organised holidays where all of that is taken care of for you. Once we'd finish the Hebridean Way, our challenge was then to get us plus bikes back home. Our chosen method was to cycle to Stornaway, get a ferry to Ullapool where we are staying tonight, cycle to Inverness over two days and then train and cycle back to Glasgow airport where we've left the car. Today was the start of that return journey and it's been an absolutely brilliant day with su...
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Day 9 - the beginning of the end

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The day started with my daily act of presenile dementia, by cycling away from the hotel with the room key in my back pocket. Disappointingly, Lesley didn't volunteer to ride back to the hotel with it (whatever happened to "for better or for worse"), so I retraced our steps while Lesley proceeded solo to the first sightseeing stop. On a positive note, at least the wind was on my back for half of the return journey and it's added 7 miles to my annual total. The day also started where yesterday finished, with wind and some rain in our faces, the wind continuing for all of today's ride except for about 2 miles. Today's sightseeing  diversion was a blackhouse, a house in which people used to live with their livestock, kept warm by a peat fire although there was no chimney for the smoke to escape. Thankfully, B&B standards have improved considerably since those days. However, despite the headwind and some very long, straight and undulating...
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Day 8 - a free cup of coffee

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One of those grey days where you grit your teeth and just keep pedalling. It's been overcast with light showers for most of the day so we were in waterproofs nearly all the time. I didn't tell Lesley before we set off that we had a steep climb very early on in the ride, 600 feet with a maximum incline of about 15% but she managed it with panniers and without needing to walk up any of it so she's beginning to believe in her cycling ability. Highlights and observations of the day * We stopped at an art gallery and got a free cup of coffee, which may have had something to do with the fact that we bought a small print from them. They had a sign outside saying they did coffees which was like an oasis in a desert as we hadn't seen anywhere to stop for ages. The coffee sign was obviously a clever marketing ploy and we fell for it! * We stopped at the Callanish stones which are the oldest evidence of people living in the Outer Hebrides in antiquity ...
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Day 7 - a day on the beach

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Some interesting dinner companions last night at our B&B - a retired French Professor of Marketing and Project Management who spends his retirement visiting World Heritage Sites, and a retired married couple both of whom used to be hydrogeologists, specialising from what I could understand in problems associated with land flooding. The B&B owner also lived a what seems to be typical Hebridean life as a portfolio worker, running a B&B, cutting grass right through the year and volunteering for the local RNLI. Today is Sunday so everything, including golf courses, on the island is closed. Thankfully, everything doesn't include hotels! The day's cycling has been relatively straightforward, just over 20 miles from Leverburgh to Tarbet in Harris, with 1300 feet of climbing, a wind of 10-15mph in our faces for the first 10 miles and the threat of rain which meant waterproofs for much of the day. Luckily the rain wasn't heavy or long-lasting so m...
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Day 6 - climbing and improvising

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The original plan for today, just 10 miles plus the ferry to Leverburgh, was embarrassingly unambitious, probably driven originally by location of available accommodation at the time, so we've improvised (most unlike me) and cycled without having a pre-planned Garmin route to use. We had a sightseeing visit planned to a local church, St Clements, and extended that to make a circuit of South Harris as you can see. The ferry crossing was enlivened by seeing some seals and by meeting up again with other cyclists we had already met. We also chatted with a solo Dutch cyclist who was wild bikepacking, so not using any official campsites etc. Unfortunately there wasn't time to ask the big questions like how she charges her smartphone before we had to get off the ferry. After our sightseeing trip, we set off up the eastern side of the island. Unlike most of our Hebridean cycling so far, this involved hi...
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Day 5 - the serious sightseeing begins

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It's an indication of how strong the winds were yesterday that today we set off in winds of 25mph that would have normally put us off at home. Getting going was hard as we got a strong headwind immediately as we rode out of the hotel which kept us down to about 7mph. After that, whenever we were heading roughly East we were flying along, but any direction of travel with a Westerly component was painfully slow. Other than the wind, the weather has been great, with negligible rainfall, lots of blue skies and pleasant temperatures. We'd planned lots of sightseeing which turned out to be a bit of a challenge as lots of it wasn't signed at all when we got there. We found most of what we set out to see with the undoubted highlight being the particularly difficult to access large scale camera obscura at Lochmaddy (think pinhole camera from Y7 Physics) from which you can see the picture projected onto the wall below. Interestingly this shows up better in the...
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