LEJOG Blog

Our host at the Bank House, Mike, washed and dried a load of clothes for us for which we were very grateful. We found that Mike is a very accomplished hill-walker, having conquered every Scottish Munro - all 284 of them.

We set off rather late, after 10am, but made very good progress along Loch Ness, dropping into Urquhart Castle for a coffee. Normally, this would have been out of the question because the entry fee for the castle was £6.30 per adult and you had to buy a ticket in order to access the café. However, for the weekend of 21st-22nd April, many Scottish historical attractions were opening their doors free, so we had a coffee and some cake without bothering ourselves with the castle.

Shortly came the major climb of the day, heading north from Drumnadrochit up to Convinth Glen. This was long and steep and Janet and I pushed the bike for nearly ¾ of a mile. Eventually, we caught up with Chris who was waiting by a small loch with the lunch. Although pushing the tandem up a long 1 in 6 had been hard work, when we were on the top, the wind was cold. We were keen to make a move and the descent towards Beauly was great fun as once again, Janet and I broke our speed record: 46.2mph. This hill was not especially steep, just very long but if you cannot build up a bit of pace coming off the Highlands, when can you?

Very shortly after this, we had a potentially embarrassing incident because I was unable to unclip my left shoe - one of the bolts holding the cleat having come undone. We continued to cycle and I took my shoe off as we did so and eventually stopped without mishap. After some fettling, I extricated my shoe and we continued.

I seem to remember an old saying quoted to me when I visited Elgin some years ago when I worked for Customs and Excise: "Speak well of the Highlands but live in the Laich" - the Laich being the stretch of coastline between Nairn and Elgin, which has a particularly mild climate. I don't think that Beauly, the Muir of Ord or Dingwall can correctly be called the Laich, but we all noticed how much warmer it felt at the lower level.

We had a brief explore of Dingwall town centre but there's not much going on at 5pm on a Sunday. We climbed the minor road to avoid the busier routes and I decided it was time to do something about the buckled wheel which had been annoying us for a couple of days. I found the spoke key, tried to adjust a spoke or two in the offending part of the wheel and discovered a completely loose spoke, still attached at the nipple end but the spoke wasn't broken - the hub was. A piece of metal about an inch long had broken off my precious Rohloff hub.

This is definitely a tour-threatening situation. If another spoke on the rear wheel, or more to the point, another chunk of hub, were to break off, then I would be most reluctant to ride.

When we reached our hotel, a fairly unpleasant place with no real ale and a very restricted food menu, I set to work trying to superglue the offending piece of hub back into place, but with little success.

We visited the local Indian for our evening meal and it was a case of Balti Towers as the service was very slow but the apologies profuse, the woman blaming her husband for the tardiness of the meal. Eventually, the food arrived and it was very good, although at the end, we were treated to a discourse on how to provide low fat Indian food to Scotsmen.

We returned to our hotel and I made another attempt to glue the piece of hub back into place. There will be phone calls to Bridgewater in the morning and I can see the headline in Der Zeitung now: "Rohloffhub in Landsendtojohnogroatenfahren kaput ist!".