Day Seven of Nine! It doesn't seem like yesterday that we were looking at nine days of cycling ahead of us and now there are only two! This trip has gone in the blink of an eye!
Today our plan was to reach Fort William via the Highlands.... This was something that I found to be daunting but decided to go with the flow and take it as it comes!
We spent the first hour of the day negotiating traffic, roadworks and dodgy standard highways out of East Kilbride and towards Paisley and off past the airport towards Loch Lommond. Ian watched and took photos of planes as they landed and took off very much like and excited school boy, which I found highly amusing and offered him one of my anorachs!
We crossed Erskine Bridge and carried onto Loch Lommond which we reached in good time. Here we resided at Duck Bay and had a soup and took in the view! This Loch reminded me of Italian lakes shown on films and was absolutely stunning! We cycled from one end to the other and enjoyed most of it with the sun beating down on our backs (exacerbating my already ludicrous tan-lines!). At the furthest end we met the support crew and had an ice-cream (a great idea from Ian!) and refueled for the next leg!
From Loch Lommond we cycled on into the Highlands and met some real characters along the way (including a couple of New Zealanders in a Winnabego) who gave us some useful advice on what to expect as we followed the A82 past some enormous mountains and the ski centre! Here we had a climb from 400ft to over 1,200 before making a 9mile decsent down to Glencoe.
The climbs came steady and regularly with some flats breaking the monotony of the grind. Once at the summit we were looking upon a baron land with spectacular views before winding our way down to Glencoe.
Glencoe was the stopping point for the evening as all the hotels and guesthouses between here and Fort William were full. We had sent our fabulous support crew out to get us lodgings for the evening and they came up absolute trumps with the Glencoe Hotel! Unfortunately the room we had consisted of a large double bed (Andy's), a large single bed (mine) and a put-me-up cot (Ians's) all in one room, reminding me of the story of Goldilocks and the three Bears! This has bought us straight back to a 20mile deficit to be overcome if we are to finish on schedule... This means that a trip of 120miles is on the cards for tomorrow and so therefore I need to get a good meal and a good nights sleep and so I shall sign off for now!
Take care!
TK x
No comments:
Post a Comment