Day 1: London to Lochranza

(I suppose I can serialize my trip to Scotland. It was fairly amusing.)

Up before the dawn, an early day, have to get to Finsbury Park to catch the train. My first big bike tour. I hope I packed the right stuff. I did some last minute oh I need this and jettison that in a vain attempt to find the perfect balance of stuff to get me through the week. Much wiser now, the next time will be perfect.

No Kings Cross because of maintenance work (note this item as a reoccurring motif through out the day. Dear England and Scotland, this is your railroad, we are closed for the bank holiday weekend, please stay home and don't bother us. Hugs and kisses, National Rail.) I would see many happy faces today as everybody found out that trains were delayed and canceled all over the place.

So, skip ahead to much later, made it to Edinburgh. On the way, I admired the fields of yellow. Pretty stuff. Not the same stuff as the yellow bushes all over Scotland. Gorse, I asked many times, forgot just as many. Will not forget now, gorse, gorse.

Rage started showing. I made my way to the car with the bike rack on the Glasgow train and made sure I was first on. A dad then crowded on with his three sons and their bikes and when the conductor told them there were too many bikes on the train, he raged and cursed and said many colorful things about the rail system. (See, a motif.) He must have worked it out later because two of the sons ended up back on and I presume the rest of them somewhere else on the train.

Glasgow, off to my 15 minute tour as I tried to find the other train station for my connecting train to Androssan. Hmm, more trouble on the horizon, there are no trains to Androssan today. Please Ms. nice ticket lady, write down exactly where I need to go and what trains and where to switch. Of course it didn't matter because the train from Kilwinning got canceled anyways. After a while, they found a coach to take me, my bike in the cargo hold, and a bus load of pissed off yet jolly passengers to somewhere. They let me off somewhere in Androssan, which was close enough, go that way behind those buildings and there is a ferry there.

Found it, got tickets, only 30 minutes to the last ferry of the day. So, considering everything, not bad. Met up with G. and J. there and rode the ferry over. The ride from Brodick was uneventful, lots of sheep, earth tone colored plants and landscape, wind, hills, and the sun set on us. The hill seemed awful at the time but in retrospect it was probably not much at all. Today as I was leaving for work, I loaded a bunch of extra stuff I probably didn't need at work into my pannier, I suppose as a sentimental thing, or maybe so that I don't lose my edge so quickly.

We were the last arrivals, so things were already winding down for the night. Dinner had already been served and the local restaurants had all closed. GC hooked me up with spare pasta that was around and I was happy. This introduced me to the never ending wonder of food on these tours. For one thing, I don't even like food all that much but there was just so much good food, and so much of it too. And also of the wonder of the packrat tendencies. Nobody had any food but pretty much anybody could pull together stuff out of pockets and panniers to feed a family of eight, which I suppose would feed two cyclists. And locusts, and in other news, a pack of 11 cyclists descended on town X and tore through the entire scone supply and only left a small trail of empty tea cups. 22.30 miles for the day. Sorry, I don't know what that is in kilometers since I don't speak kilometers. America beat off that pesky metric system in the 70s.