2009-Jul-29 by Gregory Williams.

I’d expected to pass several Sustrans mileposts today, but not anywhere near the number that I ended up passing. If you read the words on most of the milepost designs you’ll see that 1000 were funded by the Royal Bank of Scotland as a millennium project. Actually there a few more than that as local authorities etc. have funded a few privately. I passed 13 mileposts today. So over 1% of all of those on the National Cycle Network. I covered over 70 miles today (the NCN had about 12,000 miles in total the last I knew), so it shows that the mileposts are quite disproptionately placed around the network — I should have only expected half of the number of mileposts that I actually saw. It’ll be great for OSM’s mapping when I get the data online though, especially as much of today’s route didn’t seem to be mapped yet, based upon what I saw on my Garmin GPS’s display (admittedly several weeks out of sync with the main OSM database now).

The weather was actually pretty good today, despite the forecast for showers. In reality hardly any spots of rain and quite a bit of pleasantly warm sunshine. Now that my brakes are working as they should again it was a highly enjoyable day of cycling, especially as the distance was back to a longer run again. Near to the end of the day’s journey there’s a split in NCR1, so as I was having fund and had some spare time I decided to cycle both braids to ensure that they’ll be mapped.

When I got to my accomodation in Banff there turned out to be some unexpected miles appended to my journey though. It turns out that they’d accidentally double-booked my room. They had tried to contact my home number, but of course I’ve been on the road for several weeks now, so missed those messages. They did helpfully arrange me some alternative equivalent accomodation in the adjacent town of MacDuff though, and luckily that’s not much further to cycle (in fact it’s not very far from part of the planned route for tomorrow). So, I’m now writing this posting from MacDuff instead of the expected Banff. I did get a large £20 donation from the B&B owner in Banff for the British Heart Foundation, whom I raising funds for by doing this ride. Thanks on behalf of both myself and the BHF for that.

Posted in Cycling | No Comments »

2009-Jul-29 by Gregory Williams.

The mileage was fairly low again today. That’s lucky because my brake pads have been wearing very thin, so needed replacing. I didn’t manage to find the bike shops in Inverness, but did find one in Nairn, today’s destination. So, now I can brake more confidently again, rather than having to plan for hills to perform my braking for me.

In Inverness I revisited the railway station. I looked there on my way north aware that there should be a Sustrans milepost somewhere there, but I couldn’t find it. The motorcyclists I met several days ago at the Crask Inn said that they’d seen it near the cycle parking at the station. So, I looked a bit harder this time. The difficult bit was finding the cycle parking (which turned out to be on platform 6/7). After that the milepost was easy. This one’s a Mills type and is little unusual in that it doesn’t have destinations written on either of the branches of the tree (The artwork is called the Fossil Tree). I guess the destinations could be a bit confusing given that the milepost isn’t at all aligned with the cycle route itself, which is in fact a few hundred metres away.

On the way out of Inverness eastwards both NCR1 and NCR7 followed the same path. This was retracing my route from when I’d passed through several days ago. NCR1 diverges from NCR7 near the Clava Cairns, and you’re rewarded with a view of a viaduct pretty much straight away before the route climbs into the hills. The route is very quiet here and soon runs along roads through various forests before descending down to Nairn. In Nairn it joins the riverside and I left the route soon after to go and find my accomodation and the bike shop “Bike Bug”.

Tomorrow’s distance will be almost double today’s, so should go some way to restoring my average for the last few days. I expect to see several Sustrans mileposts along this stretch, so I’ll have fun photographing and mapping those as well as passing through several fairly well-known Scottish towns along the way such as Kinloss and Elgin before arriving at Banff.

Posted in Cycling | 1 Comment »