Here's today's route and map.
The morning was as perfect a ride as you could wish for! A gentle downhill over 30 miles in beautiful scenery and glorious sunshine with a cooling breeze (yet again a tailwind! We’ve been so lucky in that respect.) is right up there with the best rides we have ever done - along the Iceland Parkway in the Canadian Rockies, the 30+ km downhill of the Grand Ballon in Alsace, the first day of the Tour de France in Britain with 5,000 other cyclists, across the Rhone Delta in the Camargue and others. The scenery is simply stunning - it is impossible to believe that this area does not have National Park status to protect it for the future.
We turned off the bustling(joke!) A 836 onto the B873 (almost impossible to believe, but this was narrower than the A road} and, in a stretch of 12 miles/19km, we saw 12 cars, 1 motorbike, 6 cyclists going faster than us (doing LEJOG in 13 days - but “cheating” because they had two cars carrying luggage and taking them between the route and their accommodation! Sounds like a plan to us!!)
There was also a family with a mother, 4 children under the age of 12 plus either a father or a teenage son (neither of us were particularly observant or certain of what we saw!) on 4 bikes + 3 trailers of luggage/little ones and they were doing John o’Groats to Land’s End - a seriously impressive feat with a girl of no more than 11 with a trailer and a boy of about 8 with panniers! We would have stopped to speak with them but they were just getting under way after a stop and we know that one does not welcome the interruption once you‘ve made the decision to “set sail”!!
And so to the second half, Brian! Almost as soon as we hit the coast road we encountered an uphill, swiftly followed by an downhill, followed by ….! You guessed it! In common with many coastal roads it was serious of steep ascents immediately followed by serious descents. This was accompanied by a fairly long shower. So much for our hopes of two successive dry days!
And so it went on - until, passing the Dounreay experimental nuclear site that is in the process of being decommissioned, we passed a tourist information thingy that said this ridge marked the boundary where the gentle fertile slopes of Caithness gave way to the rolling hills of Sutherland - except that we were going the other way! It proved to be correct - although there were still hills to climb, they were less steep and not so high and so we were able to move at a faster pace.
Eventually we rolled into Thurso after 102 km/64 miles feeling more tired than we have done for a while. We were grateful that the hotel was easy to find and ready to serve orange juice, beer and food! Just a short ride tomorrow to go!
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