After last years Way of the Roses ride my brother John (not a monk) and I decided to tackle a Scottish Highlands ride for a local Fibromyalgia charity in Manchester. The ride would be around 50 miles longer over one less day so would be a good test of whether our fitness levels had improved over the year. The terrain and weather would also be more variable and I very much doubted we would have the same luck as last year, when miraculously we were not rained on once (and each week either side of when we rode was filled with more traditional, stormy British weather). I had also invested in some much-needed pannier bags. On the ride last year I had an over-filled backpack which made me look like a turtle but this year the strain would be taken off my spine and added to the back of the bike.
Our starting point was Inverness, a bum-numbing six hour drive from home. Only stopping for lunch somewhere in the wilderness of the England-Scotland border, by the time we arrived in Inverness I was starting to go a bit strange. I knew we were close to our hotel and that it was over a bridge in the north of Inverness but I still had to ask ‘Is this the bridge?’ when driving over a very large bridge-like bridge structure, much to the amusement and subsequent piss-taking from John. We pulled up at the hotel which had a magnificent view of the bridge, a fact pointed out by John repeatedly over the next several hours just in case I had again forgotten what a bridge was.
We were hungry so quickly threw our stuff in the room and came down for dinner. They said they were busy so were sat on a table in, well, a corridor. When seated John was blocking access to the disabled toilet and my chair stuck out so wide that my right elbow was in danger of being broken every time someone walked past. Still, the food was nice.
After eating we went back up to the room to start sorting out gear out for the next day. It was then that we noticed something very peculiar about the bathroom in our room. For me, and call me old-fashioned, a bathroom is a place where you do private things that other people don’t really need to see. Whoever designed the bathroom door in this room clearly had a different opinion. Bizarrely, the bathroom door had frosting on the four or five window panels the height of the door but for some reason this frosting didn’t cover the whole panel; there was a clear border an inch or so wide around each panel, allowing anyone (i.e. a pervert or weirdo) a superb view of anyone on the lavatory. It was somewhat unsettling.
We decided to go back down to the bar and have a few games of pool. About 30 seconds into our first game, a guy wearing a hat with a feather in it wandered in with a woman who looked like an escort (the profession, not a car) and asked if we had just started playing, could he play etc. We just said we were having a few games so he sat down for about ten minutes and then just left. Maybe he thought we were playing that badly (me in particular) that a few games could mean a wait of a fortnight or two. Who knows.
Day 1
After a large breakfast to fuel us for the day we headed out to the car in a light drizzle to start getting the bikes ready to leave. I had bought pedals a few weeks earlier and tried to affix them the day before. But clearly the original pedals had been fastened on by the Incredible Hulk and the bastard things wouldn’t move. Even using an adjustable wrench, rather than loosening the pedals the wrench just adjusted. So John had brought along an industrial sized wrench to get them off before we left. Eventually he did it, the wrench almost springing back off both pedals and becoming lodged in his eye but luckily it missed and I had new cleat pedals for the next few days. I had a new bright yellow helmet which along with my blue bike and red pannier bags gave me all the colour coordination of a bag of Skittles.
And then we were off! About 300m down the road I was immediately stuck with fear as I wondered whether I had locked my car. “Of course I did. Did I?” my mind said to me. Most sane people would have probably turned around and cycled for 30 seconds back to the start to check but not me. I decided I would regularly worry about it for the next five days instead. If the car was not there when we got back then I’m sure we would be fine cycling the 350 miles back home.
We ambled up the few gentle hills out of Inverness as we said goodbye to civilisation for a few days, occasionally criss-crossing the busy A9 but not needing to cycle on it for now. Instead the first section of today’s ride was mostly on dedicated cycle paths which were signposted really well. The weather was decidedly getting worse though with the wind working in tandem with the rain to blast cold air into our faces. After not being rained on once last year our luck with the weather had seemed to run out early on. It could have been worse we both agreed, with several storms battering Scotland only a few weeks earlier.
Traffic quietened as we distanced ourselves from the A9 and the terrain became more rolling with a couple of decent climbs around Conon Bridge and Dingwall as we skirted the western side of the Cromarty Firth. Even as towns and villages became more sparse we still managed to see a Tesco delivery van out in the middle of nowhere. We stopped briefly in Alness for a snack and a stretch. It was here that I noticed John’s back. He had bought mudguards earlier in the year and told me how I should have bought some. After seeing the back of his jacket I wondered what the point would be as it looked like he had been run over by a tractor. The mudguards did indeed redirect any water spray but unfortunately with the wind seemingly blowing in all directions all it apparently did was focus the spray at his back. Whatever works for you.
The winding Scotsburn Road eventually met up with the A9 which we were on for a couple of miles. After dozens of miles of relatively serene cycling it was a bit of a shock to be sharing the road with cars and trucks doing 60mph. Still this is good motivation to pedal like a bastard to get off the road and lift your average speed by a couple of mph.
We arrived at Culrain which is a tiny settlement just inside the county of Sutherland. Our B&B was (naturally) at the top of a hill but at least by now the rain had abated and the sun was trying to force itself through the heavy clouds. I was struck by how quiet it was away from traffic. We hosed down our muddy bikes (John refused to let me hose his tractor back down despite my generous offer) and after a home-cooked meal by our host we walked down the hill back into the village to the only pub in the area, over a bridge in Invershin. After a 50+ mile ride on our first day we were ready for a pint. So it was something of a disappointment to discover the pub and attached hotel were closed for renovation. We trudged back up the hill, consoling ourselves with the fact that at least we would be fresh for tomorrow, a day filled with hills and a weather forecast that looked significantly worse than today’s conditions.
Daniel McChrystal 