Hi there,
So I have been back from Scotland a few days now, and I had a lovely time. It was quite a revealing trip for me. However, I’ll come to this later. Firstly, allow me to tell you what we (Noel and I) got up to, and where we went.
As you can tell from my previous posts, I rode from London to the Lake District (Kendal), to meet Noel. There we loaded our bikes on to his trailer, drove to Fort William, left the van and the trailer, and drove to Skye (this part was very unpleasant) The drive to Fort William from Kendal took us approximately 5 hours in sporadic rain, taking the bikes off the trailer was in nice sunny weather which was encouraging but then the proceeding 3 hours to our camp site was in heavy rain. Thankfully, the place had a tumble dryer.
The following morning (after waking up at 4:20, and waiting patiently till 8 for Noel to wake up), we proceeded to ride round the island to Elgol where thankfully the weather stayed sunny.
With the weather on your side, most things seem fine and nice, I certainly enjoyed that day quite a lot.
From there we rode back to the mainland, proceeded to get a little lost before finding our way to the high pass leading to Applecross (highest pass in the U.K. so we were told). That night we wild camped near a car park where there was a bench… much to be said about having a somewhere to sit.
The following day, as I mentioned before we rode round the Applecross peninsular north, where Noel ran out of fuel just before Sheildaig, which unbeknown to us, did not have fuel, so my half-litre loan of fuel later turned out to be a further litre of fuel. We stopped at Sheildaig for cake and coffee and then proceeded to search for fuel. At a town called Kinlochewe Noel found fuel, and as we proceeded to drive east we were greeted with dark skies that could only be described as “night”, we swiftly turned around, drove back to Kinlochewe, and made for lunch. After a few minutes of unpacking our cooking gear, the same dark skies gravitated over us. Making use of a bridge with low water level, we sat and cooked up spam and eggs for lunch.
By the time we finished eating and chatting the rain subsided. We then proceeded to ride south. Following a road to the old ferry crossing to Skye in a small bay was a little village called Glenegl where we camped on the beach, where there was tonnes of drift wood, so a fire was no problem at all. The lighting was perfect and so was the backdrop so I proceeded to make my Redhead Windscreens parody video (mainly because I didn’t receive it before I left on the trip).
The following day we made our way back to Fort William in hard rain, which made for horrible riding, I was frozen to the core and couldn’t wait to get into the dry.
So in conclusion I should share with you that: I found that my waterproofing isn’t waterproof: trousers/jacket/boots, could do with replacing… but I could have told you that over a year ago. 😀 In addition, I could also point out that on route I found that Daisy has developed a drinking habit, oh yes, she’s out of control. In the past 300 miles since returning from Scotland she has consumed an entire litre of oil.
I now declare Daisy: decommissioned (until rebuild is complete).
