Friday June 27, 2014

The weather this morning was quite cool, I wore cycling socks for the first time since – New Zealand. The sun came out about mid-afternoon.  It was a rolling hill kind of day, and a head wind, not too difficult climbs, but I didn’t have it in me today.  Sometimes it is like that, you go great guns for days and then boom, you stop.  Because we had a head wind and we now have a mirror on both bikes, we took it in turns to be up front, even that didn’t really help.

The scenery in Scotland is beautiful, which does help when you don\’t have a good cycling day.  There was a lot of wind farms and forestry.  The roads had great shoulders or bike lanes and the drivers gave us plenty of room.

On this side of the road, there was clear cutting and down the road a little ways there was a new plantation growing.

You cannot see the wind farms in this photo, due to the grey skies, but they were there!

When we got to Abington, we bought some fresh buns and ham and made a quick sandwich outside of the little grocery store.  We then headed down to our campsite, which was reasonably priced and had all the facilities we needed including a picnic table.

Ralf commented on how he liked the Scottish lilt, until he heard the woman in the camper next to our tent screaming at her child.  Not so much a pleasant Scottish lilt more a screaming banshee.

As we were getting ready for bed the midges attacked us.  These things came from no where and swarmed the tent.  We didn’t feel any bites until later when we both noticed red welts on our face and legs.  These are almost as bad as the sandflies in NZ.  Although the you couldn’t even see the sandflies biting you.

I chatted to a lovely lady who is on holiday with her two grandsons for a few days.  They went panning for gold in the rivers and the kids actually found some gold.  Just wee speckles she said, the kids were over joyed and the littlest wanted to make a ring for his Mum out of his portion of the gold, she wasn\’t sure how she was going to explain that there wouldn\’t be enough for a ring.

An early night and hopefully a good nights sleep.