Bike hippy misses bike

Hi, readers... those of you who are still around anyway. If you're still coming back and checking for new posts every so often, thanks for sticking around. If you're still coming back and checking every day, you're insane and need new hobbies.

I've not exactly lived up to the "bike hippy" label lately. I've been out for some nice day rides close to home (Dorset and Somerset), many in combination with geocaching, but for the last few months I've been peddling the feeble excuse of being far too busy working.

It's not like I've got a real job. Touring made me very much allergic to permanent work, however travelling and life in general take their financial toll and after almost three years of the both of us being unemployed / running our own not-yet-profitable business, it was decided that somebody had better go out and earn some proper money. I think I did pretty well out of it to start with the basic requirement of getting any old contract to top up the bank account (after all it's only for a few months) and end up on a ridiculously cool project developing a brand new website for the BBC. I'm just over half way through a six month contract and having an awesome time.

I'm living part time in London at the moment. I only get home every two weeks or so and whenever I do it always seems like there are hundreds of things to do, the bike rides never seem to happen and it makes me sad. However, working in London was a good opportunity to get the poor neglected little orange brompton out so I'm still getting something of a cycling fix in the form of a 5 miles each way commute, but up and down the A40 is not very adventurous and I miss riding through winding lanes, between green fields, up and down mountains, across continents... see? Daydreaming again.

If you use twitter, you can follow bikehippy. I'm hoping that even if I can't come up with full blog posts all the time I might be able to manage 140 characters every now and then.

Some thoughts on Scotland

It's been about 3 months since I got back from Scotland.

It hasn't stuck with me the way other trips have, and didn't really leave me wanting more. Only now am I starting to get the travel itch again and when I do it's mostly with memories of earlier trips. Perhaps it's because riding from home to a distant point feels like more of a journey, there's a feeling of achievement and adventure which isn't the same when your start point is also your finish line. Maybe it's that riding in the UK doesn't hold the same excitement as setting off across foreign lands and trying to get by in funny languages. (Gaelic doesn't really count) It's helped me figure out a little more about what I like in a tour, which is good.

There were some nice aspects to the tour. The campsites in Scotland are pretty good and it was great to get hot showers and not smell so bad. It's easier to get hold of books in my own language. The scenery was lovely and it was fun staying at hostels and meeting other cyclists. I was even fortunate enough not encounter any haggis, kilts or bagpipes. The weather sucked at times but I was blessed with a few lovely days too. The drivers acted like British drivers, there weren't too many of them but the single track roads make it more of a big deal when you do meet one.

The food situation left a lot to be desired. I really missed the little boulangeries and charcuteries of France, fresh bread, pastries, cheese, fruit & veg in every town, my morning pain au chocolats... In the remote Scottish islands, such shops are rare. Most are Co-ops and general grocery stores with very little in the way of good fresh produce. The only thing Scotland really had going for it foodwise was the excellent local smoked fish.

The Outer Hebrides are quite a popular cycle touring destination. They are very special with some beautiful spots and I'd recommend going just for the experience of going, but they're definitely not among my greatest cycling experiences, and I doubt that would be much different if the wind had been on my back. I'm quite glad I didn't end up cycling on Lewis as apparently there are many miles of boggy flatness.


Gearing down

Those of you who like to store useless information in your brains may remember that I changed my gearing before going on this trip. In my daily cycling at home I found that this really helped with getting up hills. Once fully loaded I found it helped a little but not enough. Unfortunately I would need to change quite a few more bits and pieces to get my gears any lower so it's not likely to happen soon.


Early return

There were a few reasons why I came back earlier than planned and one of them is also the reason that it's taken me so long to write up this trip... our new business.

Dgym and I started our web hosting business back in January and have been working hard at it ever since. There's been quite a lot to work on, while I was away dgym and I often found ourselves talking quite excitedly over the phone about new ideas, making me a little keener than usual to come back home.

So it's been busy and exciting and it's taken me longer than usual to get the travel itch back into my system, but now summer is here it's happening again and I'm hoping to get enough sorted with the business that I can get going again.

One difficult thing about running this kind of business is that once people have signed up they are paying for a constant service and you need to make sure that service is always there for them. The nice thing is that when the service is running, most people are generally happy and don't tend to bother you. With the right setup to alert you if anything goes wrong or anybody does need help, and the tools to put it right wherever you are, things can be pretty sweet. It somewhat messes with my ideal of riding off into the distance and getting away from technology for a few weeks, but if that's a sacrifice that will enable to me tour at all, it's one worth making.

Wednesday May 7th - Back again

I woke up early again, disturbed by the breeze, which wasn't as strong as the winds of a few days ago but it doesn't take much to get the tent flapping around. I was away at 7:30 for the final day of riding.

I followed the alternative coastal route, a pleasant little single track lane which I think used to be the main Road to the Isles. It turned onto a cycle lane alongside the main road for the last stretch, and then I was in Mallaig. The ferry to Armadale was short and sweet, and then I was back on Skye, on the Sleat Peninsula which was luscious, green and smelled of wild garlic.

The road mostly followed the coast for a while, then turned inland towards Broadford. The sun was scorching by this point, it was July weather at the beginning of May (and I'm not talking about the previous year's July which was depressingly rainy). The roads were big, wide, straight, empty and fairly flat. I normally hate roads that big but occasionally it's nice to hunch down on a big stretch of tarmac, shift up to the big chainring and go for it.

The miles rolled by and soon I was back on the A87 road where I'd started out my journey, and turning towards Kyle of Lochalsh. It really isn't a great road. The surface is quite poor and it's full of fast lorries.


Grey Mouse and I stopped on Skye Bridge for a final holiday snap, and then arrived in Kyle with about four hours to spare before the train left. I went into the nearby pub for soup and chips. Some pubs like to proudly announce that their food is home cooked, that's great and all but some of them really shouldn't bother. My chips were actually potato wedges and impressively managed to be soggy on the outside and hard on the inside.

I spent the rest of the afternoon sitting around at the station, browsing the station museum and shop there and trainspotter spotting. I'm still not sure why Kyle of Lochalsh station is so important in trainspotter-land...

The train eventually left for Inverness. Unlike the outward journey ten days earlier, today was a clear and sunny day so it was a little easier to appreciate the scenery as we passed by mountains, lochs and moorland. I even saw a few deer.

I wasn't lucky enough to get a cabin on the sleeper train this time but the reclining seats were surprisingly comfortable. I was a little concerned at first that the seats all around me appeared to be reserved, and worried I might end up next to a drooling stranger all night, but as the evening drew on and the train left it became apparent that those seats were reserved for me, to allow a bit more space since there weren't many passengers. I spread out across two seats and slept very well.

Getting home was fun, I won't go into the boring details, suffice to say that if you book advance train tickets for a journey in the south of England while you're in the north of Scotland, make sure you leave a spare couple of hours to allow various different operating companies and call centres to get their act together so you can actually pick up a ticket.

Tuesday May 6th - Small Isles

After all the cycling on Monday there remained only thirty miles and a short ferry trip to get back to Kyle, one day's worth of riding for two days. I was camped near Arisaig, from which day cruises leave for the Small Isles, and on that particular day the boat was visiting Eigg and Rum.

The boat called at Eigg and there was a choice of either getting off to spend the day there, or continuing for another hour to visit Rum. I decided to stay on and spent a baking hot couple of hours wandering around the small village of Kinloch which consists of a small port, a castle, general store, craft shop, tea room and post office. Supposedly Rum has some of the worst midges in Scotland but they weren't evident today.

I visited the craft shop, a small wooden hut containing a great variety of jewellery, crochet items, picture frames and other handmade crafts. The bloke behind the counter told me his wife made everything in there. He was a creative type too, a carpenter, working on anything from furniture to houses. They had lived on the island for thirteen years and only went over to the mainland about five times a year.

We got back on the boat and, after stopping off to pick up the Eigg daytrippers, we headed back for the mainland. It was a fun day out I suppose. On the boat, we saw a few seals and seabirds - although not having binoculars, I'm not sure I got the most out of it. One lady very kindly let me borrow hers to see distant golden eagles over the cliffs of Eigg, although you could still only make out a small dot.

Dinner was a classically horrible camping meal, an uninspired mess composed of all the leftover stuff in my panniers and a couple of tins from the local co-op. Yum.

Monday May 5th - Ardnamurchan

Monday was a long and wonderful day, the kind that makes it all worthwhile. The weather was sunny, there was very little wind, beautiful scenery and I had cool new sunglasses.

I'd lost my sunglasses at some point over the past few days, hard to say when as I hadn't been needing them much until I got to Mull. Fortunately Tobermory is one of those towns that actually has shops (rare in the Scottish Isles) so the next morning I was able to buy some new ones, just in time for some sunshine to let me test them out properly.

One other good thing Tobermory had was a bakery/delicatessen, and although I think the lady in the bakery got a bit annoyed with all my umming and erring (being spoilt for choice after many days of nasty stale co-op bread and packaged cheddar), I ended up with four rather nice looking white rolls and a bit of Camembert.

The ferry to Kilchoan was tiny, with room for about three cars which had to reverse on board. It was lucky the weather was good as there was no indoor passenger deck.

Ardnamurchan was wonderful, and gave me the kind of cycling I can really get into. In the first couple of miles the road had started to ascend and I passed a walker who announced "It's a long hill". It really was.

The road wrapped around the back of Ben Hiant and back down to the coast, where it stayed for the next fifteen miles, winding in and out of glittering bays, passing through forest, mountain and moorland.

I stopped at Salen for a drink and a topup of water then headed northwards, off the Ardnamurchan peninsula and past lochs and forests towards the Road to the Isles.

The Road to the Isles is not as great as you'd expect, well maybe as rail routes and big A-roads and rail routes go I suppose it's pretty scenic but after the little winding coastal and mountain routes I'd experienced in the past couple of days, it hardly compared. It wasn't busy but it was big, and they're making it bigger. The roadworks, huge dusty piles of rubble and the stench of fresh tarmac really didn't help matters.

I eventually reached Arisaig after about fifty miles and around 7pm. I found a beach campsite nearby and spent the evening paddling and eating sausage sandwiches.