Somehow, in what feels like no time at all, I've found myself halfway up Scotland with only three (cycling, let's not think about that 14 hours of trains on Sunday) days of my adventures left.
Having had thunderstorms overnight, this morning started pretty grey, but thanks to a bit of a lie in (even I managed to sleep in past 7) nobody seemed to mind too much. After a brief stop after only 15 minutes for Evan to replace the water bottle he had left at camp, we climbed out of Tyndrym and into the Highlands. We were rewarded with some incredible scenery as we came up to Glen Coe, and since the rush hour traffic seemed to have passed we made use of the full road for a bit of a moving photo shoot.
Unfortunately, Scotland doesn't have many roads, which means the ones it does have are ridiculously busy. The Scots have tried to help cyclist by putting cycle paths next to the A roads, but they seem to have no clue what a cycle path should actually be. This became increasingly frustrating, and eventually resulted in Laura and Sarah crashing on the bridge over Loch Leven. This left her back wheel completely ruined and so once international rescue arrived we did some bike converting to make the spare bike usable and continued on our merry way.
Once the bike path abruptly ended without warning we were left on the A82 at the mercy of tourists and lorry drivers, so split up and ploughed on to Fort William for lunch.
Leaving Fort William ended up being a challenge since the routes we were following differed, and while trying to work out which was correct we were pulled over by the Scottish fuzz for what we think boiled down to not indicating at a roundabout. We did find our way onto the right path in the end but once again the dangerous traffic forced us to split up into pairs. At this point Lauren found herself clinging onto my wheel as we began a 25 mile TT at full speed. By the end of this we were both exhausted, but also buzzing from the speed we'd kept up.
The day finished on the south shore of Loch Ness, where the more warm blooded of my team mates ventured into the water in search of a monster. I meanwhile took some photos and then headed back to camp to clean my bike and rest before doing it all again tomorrow
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