A day of perfect weather and endlessly wonderful scenery along the Great Glen, starting with Loch Linnhe (picture). It was like cycling through a Highland Views Calendar stuck on early summer. All very well, but stopping every five minutes to take another photo plays havoc with your schedule.
After a stop in Fort William Wetherspoons to recharge my spent camera battery, I cycled up Neptune’s Staircase locks to follow the Caledonian Canal (picture). The last canal I cycled for any distance was the Leeds-Liverpool, which doesn’t quite match this in scenic terms.
There’s a long, delightfully scenic (and totally untrafficked) forest road you can cycle alongside Loch Lochy (picture), my favourite silly Scottish toponym. It certainly is lochy.
Well, that’s enough pictures of mountains, lochs and bikes, so here’s a cow that I saw outside Fort Augustus (picture).
And here’s an example of the sort of thing you see all over Highland roads: (picture): direction arrows, occasionally supplemented by a multilingual sign, stressing which side of the road to drive. Clearly all those German and Dutch tourists I keep seeing are liable to get a bit dazed by the awesome scenery when they stop to take a photo, and absent-mindedly default back to driving on the right when they get back on the road.
I sympathise: I’m still reeling a bit from all that scenery myself. Nothing a pint of Loch Ness Dark won’t fix, though.
Miles today: 68
Miles since Kirkmaiden: 290
Miles since starting at Penzance: 1208