Day 7
Brora to Inverness
120km, 900m ascent
SOS. It stands for Six o’clock seagulls, the birds who have provided a morning alarm call every day of the trip, without fail. That is, apart from the one morning they slept in for half an hour & became half past six o’clock seagulls, or HP SOS. I prefer Ketchup.
Both yesterday and today’s cycles involved lengthy spells of riding in single file to gain protection from the wind. Every 2 minutes the rider at the back moves from the safety of shelter to the front. It was noted (with much hilarity on my part) on several occasions during yesterday’s ride that when it was the turn of my cycling partner, Cock of the North, to come to the front, he did so at the start of a climb – thereby providing me
with the easier journey up the hills. He was spitting feathers & complaining of fowl play – but that’s just the luck of the draw.
Today we did our utmost to stay clear of the A9 and meandered our way through Golspie, Dornoch and Tain before following a quiet road running parallel with the Cromarty Firth all the way to Dingwall. It felt like familiar terrain, having spent the last 6 months regularly working in the area. The number of drill rigs in the Firth is now reaching epic proportions, I ran out of fingers counting them.
The Warriors rolled in to Inverness at the early time of 3pm. Clearly our fans had expected us to arrive much later, as the fanfare consisted of a bunch of Spanish tourists asking us to get out of the way of their photographs of the statue of Flora MacDonald outside Inverness Castle.
All in all, this was a great cycle. 862km (528 miles) and over 10,000m ascent in 7 days All that just to get back to the same place!
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