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Journey home. Clare loved it!

Sensible breakfast as we set off for an easy day. Just a 10.5 hour journey home including two short stops. Scotland is a flipping long place. Glad we don’t have to cycle it - it would take a week! It’s now approaching 10pm and Yorkshire is rather warm. It’s going to take a few days to acclimatise to the forecast heatwave. One of the things about three blokes manly bantering their way along for two weeks is that they forget to rein it in when in the presence of a lady. So poor Clare had to suffer the boys muses on where to get the best full English/Scottish in Britain, are Firths sausages still the best in the world?, how knackered they were at various parts of the route we crossed, as well as advice on Andrew’s injuries and arrangements for sitting comfortably at the Headingley Test Match on Friday. Rubber rings, cushions, and even two strategically placed beer glasses were all mentioned. She looked so relieved when we finally saw a sign saying Boston Spa! On Chris’s strict instruction...
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They only went and done it, sir! 🚴🚴‍♀️🚴‍♂️

Wow! It’s the last day, the last few miles, the last hurrah! Nice ride today, especially for Pete and Andrew because they had a 14 mile head start on Steve. Wind behind and a gentle rolling Sutherland landscape. They even had faffing time to investigate an old abandoned phone box that had become a sticker board for Lejog and nc500 travellers. Interestingly, as soon as we crossed over to Caithness, the landscape changed to wide open vistas and flat plains. We’d seen the last of the hills. Steve’s Day Log book entry day 15 Tongue to John o Groats - Awoke refreshed after a decent night’s sleep to a lovely view over the Kyle of Tongue. Very good breakfast (yet not in the top 3 - so good have some of them been). - ⁠suddenly in this part of the world, LEJOGGERS and cyclists doing other routes like the NC500 converge and you come across many more than we’d encountered since early in the trip. There were a couple of blokes having breakfast who’d done it on lightweight road bikes with a paid su...
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The adventures of Steve

Nice one Pete. My exploits probably don’t merit editing your blog for, as you guessed. Nevertheless:- - loved the cycle along the loch. Would have been a fabulous view if I’d been able to see it. - ⁠there were two hills which went up a relatively long way but v gently and smoothly - ⁠I got the same rain as you with 10 miles to go. - ⁠the first day in several that for some reason I’d forgotten to pre spray with Avon skin stuff. Stopped to put coat on when rain started and noticed the little bastards so decided best to get going again rather than spray there and then - ⁠after the pint I’d had in the Altnaharah hotel I started to need a wee but was scared to stop for fear of being bitten. Hence absolutely bursting when got to hotel - ⁠I appear to have somehow escaped being bitten unless there is a very delayed reaction. I remembered they can only fly at 4mph so did my best to cycle faster than that - ⁠hotel was tuning people away when I arrived so v v v glad I acted when I did especially ...
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Over Sutherland

Awoke in student halls so no full Scottish today. Instead, bought vast quantities of granola for breakfast, with cream! That’s what statins are for, says Pete. Pete doesn’t really get it does he? Another thing about Andrews extensive diet. His personal dietician (Merv) recommended milk. Andrew, who doesn’t do things by halves, interpreted this as drink four pints of the stuff a day. So while his comrades drink water, Andrew has taken to hanging two or three pints of milk on the side of his bike. It looks like he’s on a very small milk round. So the latest moniker is ‘Ernie, and he drives the fastest milk bike in the west’. Nobody under 60 will understand this. (Richard wins the prize). We’re getting some funny looks from people as we cycle along singing Benny Hill songs. First leg today was along the coast, which was nice. Then a hop onto the A9 for a mile or so before we turned onto a B Road that would take us all the way across wild and beautiful Sutherland. Fabulous, gentle, steady,...
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No kippers 😱

Our hotel last night was quite basic, but the breakfast was one of the best. Only marred by the kippers Steve wanted being unavailable. Weather forecast to be nice for the day. Rutherfords Law of Gravity states that water flows downhill, and when it finds a valley it forms a river. Rivers require bridges. By logical extension, any town in the Highlands that has the word ‘bridge’ in its name, such as Carrbridge, has only one way out - uphill! After a rather large breakfast our first task was a 500 foot climb! Bit of a headwind as we set off north west for 40 miles, then behind us for the last 34 miles. Nice route up towards Inverness, and a nice route beyond it. Inverness itself was a pain to cycle through - many turns, rough cycle paths we could have done without and to cap it all the cycle path over the Kessock Bridge was properly closed and locked. We had to cross four lanes of busy A9 to get to the path on the other side, then re-cross the other side. Andrew did get his Boots points...
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Well, f@@k me!

Today was always going to be about the weather. We’d known for 6 days there was a lot of rain forecast for today. This morning all the forecasts (BBC, Met Office, XC etc) said ‘proper’ rain all day, for all of our route. Woke at 7am - proper rain. Breakfast at 8am - proper rain. 9am - still proper rain! My Dad once said ‘If you want to know what the weather is like then look out the window’. But we went one better. We looked at the rainfall radar (great app by the way). It’s like a huge window in space showing what’s happened in the last 60 minutes. From this we saw the wide band of rain we’d seen out the hotel window was due to pass over by 9:30. There was another band about 20 minutes behind it. All travelling North, just like us, at about 10mph. All we had to do was leave at 9:30 and ride as fast as we could to stay in the dry spot! As I said before, our motto is ‘nothing can go wrong’! The first 17 miles involved climbing to the Pass of Drumochter at 1515 feet. This is the highest ...
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Pretty Perthshire

Andrew had a restless night pondering his fuel consumption. Waking at 6am he decided to empty everything he had onto his bedroom floor and have a long hard look. The result was that, by breakfast, he had decided to ditch his panniers and most of their contents and continue with the bare minimum. He’ll now make do with one sock and a single underpant, plus a plentiful supply of bum pads! He dumped the panniers at hotel reception promising to collect them in a week or two. The corporate hotel served a rubbery breakfast! Overcooked and bland. Pete and Steve stuck to triple Muesli. On our way, the first stop after half a mile was the co-op to stock up for lunch in case of nowhere else to be found. Then we were on our way properly. Or maybe not! Andrew realised he’d broken his spd sl cleats last night. If this was tomorrow it would have been game over but, luckily, very bloody luckily, there was a bike shop close by that had spares. Pete, being Captain Slow, set out alone while Steve waited...
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