Diary - Day 15

So the plan for Sam to get up first backfired and at this point I gave up expecting anything of him for the rest of the trip. My plan was not to get up before 8am, but let Sam get up beforehand in order to sort the washing out. He stumbled out of bed at 9 and we were finally ready at about 10:30. To make things worse the weather was really bloody miserable and yet again obscured the view in what is a fairly scenic part of the country. Very little happened all the way along the cycle route to Inverness bar the fact that we became wet, cold, frustrated and took the A9 for the last 5 miles into Inverness rather than the meandering cycle route. This was a good idea as it saved half an hour and was almost entirely downhill.

It looked like this a lot in the afternoon, but was much worse in the morning.



Strangely as we reached the edge of Inverness all signs of precipitation vanished and we were finally stopped from getting colder, which had been gradually happening throughout the day. Having been through Inverness two years ago on my other 'end-to-end' I had remembered some key info, i.e. where the Subway was so that we could get a big sandwich. While finding the shop and getting the sarney was easy enough, eating it was a pain due to the outdoors nature of our seat, the wetness of clothing and the bloody cold wind that belted through the streets.

Fuller, but still cold, we found the tourist info centre and they pointed us in the direction of a bike shop. Sam purchased some gloves, overshoes and possibly some other essentials. I purchased a cycling top for the most part because it was right in front of me and I had meant to do so for ages. With the weather continuing to be rubbish for most of the trip it was probably a good idea, but I don't think it made much difference in the long run. We headed on out to Munlochy, over the Black Isle, before rejoining the A9 as the Cromarty ferry was not running today. In fact we stuck to the A9 for most of the rest of the journey as it was not as busy as I expected and was wide enough for the most part to allow easy overtaking.


However, we didn't get through this stretch without a bit of drama. One reason I agreed to do this bike ride with Sam, knowing full well that he would come into it underprepared, was to test my own limited patience. Last time I did an End-to-End it fell apart after we reached Pitlochry as I completely ran out of patience with my co-cyclist, the whole ride being a shambles from start to finish, and did the last few hundred miles alone. This time I hoped to last 5 weeks without blowing my top. About ten miles before reaching Dornoch Sam looked over his shoulder, said something unintelligible, then stuck the brakes on and very nearly caused me to crash straight into the back of his bike. Not ideal, but it turned out the unintelligible words were that he wanted to stop and I possibly should have guessed. No idea why he needed to stop so suddenly though.

I wasn't exactly impressed, but no damage done and we needed to crack on. If this is the worst that happens then it's far from bad..........................................(yeah, well, of course that's not the worst, you should probably be able to guess that by now).

We arrived in Dornoch just after 8pm and didn't get into town for a meal until about 9:30 when everywhere had finished serving except one restaurant called Luigi's. A bit expensive, but pretty damned tasty and we had a bottle of Black Isle Brewery's 'Red Kite' which was expensive but pretty damned tasty. And that was about it for the day. Another tiring day rounded off with a good sleep, although I had to get up at 3:30am for a wee in weather that could be described as 'sideways rain'. Well worth it though.

Day 15 review

Mileage = 85