The trip was a fantastic experience, with even heavy rain on Day 4 (the second day I failed to cover as it happened in this blog) failing to, er, dampen my spirits. Indeed, Day 4 was probably the most spectacular in terms of scenery, but I should cover the trip in chronological order. And that means going way back to the first day I descended into radio silence, the day I travelled from Pitlochry to Killin near Loch Tay.

Pitlochry to Killin

Pitlochry is a lovely little town, not far from another famous battleground at Killiecrankie, with a picturesque town centre that isn’t too busy. There’s a large hydroelectric dam nearby, with a salmon ladder running alongside – the idea is that the fishies can still jump between the concrete tanks to swim upstream. It must be a spectacular sight in the breeding season, but I suspect this isn’t it! (And perhaps the salmon would have been in bed by the time I wandered down there anyway…)

Sadly, the route out of Pitlochry is not particularly thrilling. It’s largely flat – good for a rest on the bike – but runs along quiet country lanes for most of its length. At one point it crosses an ex-railway bridge across a stretch of river, now a privately owned road, but even that isn’t particularly inspiring. Eventually you reach the town of Kenmore at one end of Loch Tay, where the heavens opened and I sought refuge in a cafe.

Several (several!) cups of tea and a light lunch later, the rain had cleared up and I was ready to get on the move again. The view from Kenmore is beautiful as you climb up above the loch, with the water seeming to stretch out endlessly into the distance. What rather sours the panorama is the fact that you know from your Sustrans map that the other end of the loch, 17 miles away at the town of Killin, is where the cycle route is leading you.

Cycling alongside a loch may be lovely, but 17 miles later even the prettiest view is going to get old. Add to that an constantly undulating route (none of the hills severe, but each less welcome than the last), and you feel rather glad when you reach your destination. As it happens, you tumble into Killin quite unexpectedly – one minute you’re barrelling down one of the many downhill sections, the next you turn a corner and encounter a group of old biddies from a coach tour standing around in the middle of the road. Good job I was braking already!

Killin’s location on the River Dochart, with its miniature waterfalls tumbling under the town’s bridge, makes it a great place to spend the night. I fell asleep to the sound of running water. Sadly, I awoke to the sound of water falling from the sky…

Yes, before I’d gone to bed I’d stolen a look at the weather forecast and was dismayed by what I saw! There was an unseasonable low pressure coming in from the Atlantic, bringing with it heavy rain and, later in the day, high winds from the southwest – headwinds for me, in other words. Not really what I wanted to hear. As Sunday dawned with diagonal rain hammering on the windows, I was tempted to abandon the day’s cycle and get the train instead.

Unfortunately, the nearest train station was over 15 miles away on a trunk road – not a very appetising prospect, and I would get soaked to the skin over that distance anyway! In the end, encouraged by some friends of my B&B host, I decided to chance the day’s ride as planned…

Killin to Balloch

I was glad I did! The route from Killin to my eventual destination at Balloch was by far the most spectacular section of the entire ride. Just outside Killin the route climbed into the hills on an old railway line, eventually popping out on the defunct Glen Ogle railway viaduct, now part of the cycle route. The views from the viaduct are amazing – if you have been over the Glenfinnan viaduct, as seen carrying the Hogwarts Express in THOSE films, you have some idea. It was still raining, I was soaked, but I didn’t care.

Just as well really – before Callander the rain held off for an hour or so, but as soon as I reached the town it fell again with a vengence. I locked my bike to the nearest immovable object and headed into a cafe, where I attempted to hide until the rain had passed. It was no good – eventually I had to leave in the pouring rain, heading onwards to Balloch. By this stage the wind had picked up too, blasting me backwards every time I tried to pick up speed. I resigned myself to making slow, wet progress; by this stage, at least, I was so wet I couldn’t actually get any wetter.

The rest of the way to Balloch was spent alternately cursing pine woods (the route passes through some forests I’m sure are lovely, in better weather), hills, rain, wind, cars (only occasionally did these pass me, but I knew their occupants were warm, dry and probably feeling pretty smug), and once, during a mercifully dry spell, punctures. Eventually though, I made it – at 8:30pm. Never before have I been so glad to arrive at a good, old-fashioned Youth Hostel, shared rooms and wet clothes hanging on every available surface and all.

But to reiterate, Sunday was the best day. There may have been rain, there may have been strong winds, but the spectacular sights en route more than made up for it. You always dry off eventually.

Balloch to Glasgow

By comparison, the route from Balloch into Glasgow city centre was an absolute doddle. It was predominantly along pancake-flat old railway paths and riverside paths, with the odd town centre route thrown in. In Dumbarton, I had an excellent opportunity to get soaked again as the route led me into an underpass – luckily I spotted just in time that the ‘puddle’ spreading across its mouth was a good two feet deep! Although hardly inspiring as a cycle route, the Balloch to Glasgow section was a welcome respite from the rigours of the previous days’ journey through the Highlands, and gave the encouraging impression of arriving into the city with plenty of energy to spare. Only the fact my shoes were still dripping wet reminded me of the previous day’s hardships, which were well worth it.

There are no pictures for the last two days of the journey, because the rain made it difficult to stop and take things out of my bag without everything getting soaked. Don’t worry – the iPhone camera would make the places I passed through look rubbish anyway. It’s the rules.

Footnote: the puncture repair made between Kenmore and Killin lasted all the way through the rainy journey from Killin to Balloch, the on-and-off rainy journey from Balloch to Glasgow, the journey home, and a commute to and from work. The patch eventually blew off just as I arrived home – an extremely considerate time for it to give up the ghost.

Thanks patch! You have now been replaced.

In fact, it will be THIS short, aside from saying that I’m by Loch Lomond. And still drying out. Night night!

If it’s blowing in from behind you, it bowls you merrily along without you even being aware of its presence, giving you a misleading impression of your cycling prowess. But you’ve got no closer to being Lance Armstrong – it’s the stiff breeze doing all the work. In that sense, wind is treacherous in a way that snow and ice can never be. At least you know where you are with ice – usually on the floor or wrapped around a tree.

Cycling with the wind in your face is, on the other hand, a miserable experience. Every effort to pick up speed seems in vain as the wind pushes you back to a crawl. It’s like cycling uphill, but the only payoff comes if you turn around and go back the way you came.

The day began in wind-free fashion in a morning during which I redefined “taking it easy”. After a leisurely breakfast and many cups of tea, I headed all of two miles down the road to Newtonmore, where I stopped off at its free Highland Folk Museum. What was intended as a flying visit (it would be rude not to visit a free attraction!) soon turned into an entire morning spent poking around recreations of 1930s farms, 18th-century Highland crofting communities and a couple of great “flat-packed” churches and schools, supplied as corrugated iron sheets for assembly in situ. Truly the Ikea of the early 20th century.

Not long after leaving Newtonmore, full of more tea and a cake, I had my first encounter with my old enemy, the wind. It was blowing from directly the direction I was travelling. When I was researching the trip, I’d read that Scotland’s prevailing wind is southwesterly, making a journey from north to south the better option if you want to avoid it in your face. I decided that the other advantages of a north-to-south route outweighed the danger of being hindered by wind – I was regretting it today!

A late lunch in Dalwhinnie, only about 15 miles from Kingussie, showed just what an effect the wind (and, admittedly, my lazy morning) had made. There I met two blokes who were travelling from Pitlochry to Kingussie, the opposite of my journey. They were nearly home and dry and I had over 30 miles to go!

The wind had come on the day I would be crossing the most exposed and isolated point on the trip, the Drumochter Pass. With a summit of 1516 feet, climbing it would not be much fun on the best of days, but climbing it with a wind of 15mph+ in my face (according to the BBC weather web site) was slow work. Luckily, the scenery is spectacular, even if it runs close to the A9 most of the way (and immediately alongside – separated by a crash barrier – at times). Eventually I made it to the top, heralded first by a sign on the nearby railway line – the highest point on the rail network! – and then a similar sign for travellers on the A9.

As soon as I got over the summit, the wind abated. Don’t ask me why – you’d think the hill would have protected me from a headwind as I was climbing it, but it seems the opposite is true. The rest of the journey into Pitlochry was comparatively plain sailing – helped by the long, enjoyable run down from the views of Drumochter and some very quiet, decent roads.

Many of the roads used by this part of National Cycle Route 7 are old sections of the A9, either abandoned entirely as they were superseded by the faster, safer route of the new A9 built a short distance away, or simply reclassified as traffic moved over to the new road. These reclassified roads are great – wide and well-surfaced, as they would have been in their A9 glory days, but now almost entirely devoid of traffic. But it’s the sections that have been entirely abandoned, save for their new life as a cycle track, that are most special. They’re narrower now, as the undergrowth has been allowed to creep in on both sides, but the surface is still good and the white line leads you down the centre. Even the metal holders for the cats eyes are still in place. The only trouble comes when the white line continues straight into a newly sprouted mound of earth deposited by one of the new A9’s massive embankments…

I’m writing this while sat next to the river at Pitlochry, still broad daylight at 9:45pm. It would be very relaxing, if it wasn’t for the fact that Pitlochry Drum-n-Bass Fest 2010 seems to be taking place on the opposite bank! Oh well – you can’t have it all.

My bike has, not to put too fine a point on it, some reliability issues. If a piece can fall off my bike, it probably will (and a lot of the time, has in the past). Just last week, while I was out roaming the countryside, a screw fell out and the pannier rack fell off.

Today, the bike wasn’t going to let me down. Not far out of Inverness, one side of my front mudguard fell off its mooring, leaving it flapping disconsolately through the moving spokes of the wheel. Luckily, the exact same thing had happened on the other side months earlier, so I knew exactly what to do: buy some sticky tape and Sellotape it back together! My amazing repair has, so far, been good as new – on both sides. As for the ominous creaking sound that one of the pedal cranks has developed on every revolution… we’ll have to wait and see.

The rain reared its ugly head again soon after, so I took the opportunity – and the excuse to get out of the rain – to go to the visitor centre at Culloden, the site of the last battle to be fought in Britain. Predictably, the heaviest rain was reserved for the guided tour of the battlefield, but it was worth seeing. Around 1500 men lie buried in just a few long mounds to one side of the battlefield, the result of a fight that lasted about an hour. Makes you feel lucky that those days are behind us.

Now that the weather has picked up – it was sunny, though with a fairly strong headwind, for the rest of the day – it’s still light at ten to eleven in the evening here in Kingussie. Crazy stuff.

Tomorrow promises a shorter journey than yesterday, and hopefully better weather. We’ll have to wait and see what sort of day it is for mechanical defects!

I’m travelling to Inverness, because a couple of months ago I decided it would be a good idea to cycle from there to Glasgow, over 200 miles away on National Cycleway No. 7. Don’t ask me why. I cycled about ten miles of it on a bike loaned to me by a helpful B&B owner, and it was fun. Clearly, twenty times the distance equals twenty times the fun.

The first leg of the journey is getting there, which involved getting into London, and getting out again on a ScotRail sleeper train. Arriving into Paddington and departing from Euston also meant a short hop across the mean streets of London by bike.

The first off-peak train from Oxford was a small three-coach affair, with no reserved seats, never mind dedicated bike spaces. Waiting on the platform felt a little fraught as it filled with an improbable number of passengers and fellow cyclists – would there be any room?! By a mixture of luck and judgement, I managed to be waiting just at the spot where the train doors would stop, and the other bike lovers shuffled off in defeat to other parts of the train. Result!

Sadly, my dreams of a gentle meander down the quiet streets of central London at 8:30pm proved a little naive – the place was still heaving. Luckily, bus lanes covered much of the route, and the bus drivers and cabbies knew the score! They were very accommodating, not at all like the London driver stereotype. It was surprisingly easy to cycle on the route I took, but I bet it would be a different story at rush hour!

So here I am, on a train for the next ten hours. One last piece of good fortune – the cheap seats I’d booked myself into are broken, or something, so I’ve been put into a first class cabin instead. Thanks ScotRail!

Next stop, Crewe. Next stop for me, bed.

This post is secretly a test of posting from the iPhone Wordpress app. As you were!

This makes the list 33% defunct and 100% rubbish.

So, a couple of pleas, lovely readers. Firstly:

Is your name Ryan of Ryan’s Goblog fame? Are you the mysterious force of nature behind The Line? If so, sort yourselves out guys – the Internet needs you! Oh sure, the Internet needs those other blogs too, probably, but it’s hard to tell until you get off the ground and prove yourselves. Really, in the wise words of Arnie, DO IT. And get to the blogging chopper.

Secondly, do you have any recommendations for blogs to replace the current embarrassments? Perhaps you run your own two-bit blog you’d like my reader to check out? He’s got nothing better to do. Or do you follow one religiously and think everyone else should too? Let me know in the comments and I’ll give the blog list of shame a good seeing to.

In unrelated blogging news, the revamped Wordpress – to which I was forced to upgrade to enable support for the iPhone blogging app, of which more later – is absolutely horrible. I vomit at its feet.

What were they thinking? :(

The sad truth is that the answer to both of those questions is no. First and foremost, I didn’t get bored of Twitter – quite the opposite. I was spending so long checking out people’s Tweeted links and figuring out what the latest trending topics were that it was taking up a significant chunk of my time – time that could have been better spent. The ease of checking the latest happenings from my phone just made it worse – I found myself picking the thing up just to check for new Tweets, like one of those people who can’t go five minutes without texting “wot u up to lol” to one of their tedious friends. In short, I was becoming one of Them, one of the very creatures I wish to dispel from our universe.

Here’s the really sad part. I didn’t just quit as in stop using it, drift away, as you would if you couldn’t be bothered with your favourite desert island-based American series any more. No, although I tried, its hold was too strong for that. I couldn’t help thinking, “Ooh, I bet this thing on TV is prompting a liberal backlash in the Twitterverse,” before filling up with self-loathing for even having heard of such a term as “Twitterverse”. It was no good – I had to go the whole hog and delete my account. Which was, at least, easy – but it’s quite a drastic option when Twitter can be genuinely useful, and with everyone and their dog embracing it, it will no doubt become increasingly so over the next few months. Will that drive me back? Perhaps.

There’s one consolation. At least if I do choose to return, it will be with a clean slate. Unlike other sites I can mention (hello Facebook), Twitter doesn’t secretly keep your ‘deleted’ account on ice in the back room, ready to resurrect it as soon as you crumble and enter your login credentials again. A couple of friends have fallen victim to this necromancy, their brave attempt to break free of the Facebook yoke scuppered by a creative definition of ‘remove my account’. Facebook even asks you why (why on EARTH!) you want to leave before shoving your inanimate corpse in the cryo chamber, offering up a compelling counter-argument for whatever option you choose.

As I’m sure you’re wondering, I didn’t choose the “I’m addicted to Facebook” option. Broadcasting myself to the word isn’t really my thing (hello irony! What’s that you say? I have a blog? Shut up). I happily chose, “Facebook is rubbish, the very idea that it’s popular makes me angry, let me out”. Or I would have done if that option existed. Surely even Facebook’s lovingly crafted resignation system wouldn’t have an answer to that.

Other times, people will proclaim something the next big thing and I’ll believe them. Generally, because my judgement is on a par with a drunken Lord Longford’s, this shiny new thing will be good for a while before collapsing under its own awesomeness or sinking into obscurity. Twitter recently suffered this fate outside of North America (and, er, India).

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a service where you sign up, enter your mobile number, get your chums to join you so you have someone to suffer your incessant babbling, and then sit back and watch the updates pour into your mobile phone.

The problem: SMS isn’t free, is it? Twitter have to pay like everyone else, don’t they? Well yes, they do, and that’s why Twitter have recently switched off the text message service outside of North America (and, er, India). The fledgling bridge between your online and real life has become a glorified – and really limited – Facebook wall.

The “fail whale” appears whenever Twitter’s web site breaks. I think it’s appropriate here.

Other Epic Failures

While we’re here, why don’t we have a look at some other online services whose business models will doom them to a life of epic fail, no matter how much venture capital cash can be mashed into them:

1. Gravatar. It’s a glorified image hosting service. Oh sure, it’s an invaluable service for this brave new Web 2.0 world where anybody is literally nobody without their own blog, and what’s a blog without comments and what are comments without avatars and how else can you make your avatar appear everywhere on the web without your mate Gravatar? However, no matter what its intentions, it’s a site you visit once; it then serves up your image file to unconnected web sites forever more. A glorified image hosting service, just one without much opportunity to serve up glorious money-spinning adverts.
2. Any Google competitor. Seriously. Why bother? And finally…
3. Youtube. Try to come up with the worst moneyspinning Internet idea ever, and you still couldn’t do better (worse) than Youtube. To come close, your idea would have to be not only amazingly bandwidth-intensive to serve up video content to ungrateful cretins, but also CPU-intensive to convert all their own videos into streaming Flash format. You’d need to licence every video codec under the sun. You’d need oodles of storage. You’d need your own personal Gestapo to stamp on any dodgy material and keep the copyright lawyers off your back. And to top it all off, you’d have to have your entire user base specially imported from some kind of retard colony.

All right, so the last example is something of an aberration. But the other examples? They are doomed.

It’s everywhere, from the unconvincing CGI monster-infested streets of New York in I Am Legend to doom-laden “what if” TV programmes like Channel 4’s passable Life After People or ITV’s ridiculous Flood. But before we were quite so worried about being wiped out by weird contagions or being forced to mutate into Kevin Costner by global warming, the purveyors of television drama had a much more immediate threat to frighten us silly with: mutual assured destruction.

I’m sure the certainty that anyone lobbing a nuclear warhead halfway around the world would unleash a retaliatory hail of atomic death before the missile had even left their home territory was much more likely to keep you awake at night than the vague notion that, at some undetermined point in the future, the polar ice caps might melt a bit.

Happy to feed the nightmares of their viewers, television companies stepped forward in the early 80s with two made-for-TV movies within a year of one another: Threads from the BBC in the UK, and The Day After from the US.

Everything Connects

While both of these films are still powerful enough to be scary, even after over twenty years, they each have a very different take on the post-apocalyptic landscape. In a sense, the films reflect differences in national character more than anything else: while Threads shows the population of Sheffield wallowing in medieval poverty even fifteen years after the Russian improvements to the city centre, the merry townsfolk of The Day After are seen banding together and preparing to reconstruct Uncle Sam via hard agricultural toil practically, well, the day after their own hammering.

In both cases, the films evoke the aftermath of a nuclear exchange in ways which don’t quite ring true, from opposite ends of the spectrum. The world of Threads is unrelentingly bleak, filled with deformed, mentally retarded children and adults too shell-shocked to function even a decade after the blast. The immediate aftermath of the nuclear blast causes mass panic and food shortages, which the ineffectual interim government can only curtail by taking drastic measures.

By contrast, The Day After’s rosier outlook gives us a provincial university hospital where dedicated staff remain at their posts for days, struggling to treat people who are happy to wait patiently in line despite half their faces hanging off and their entire family dying quietly by their side.

I’m sure the American TV audience would like to think it would pan out like that, but I think Threads barely has the edge on realism.

Woven together in a fabric

In both dramas, the countdown to doomsday is, if anything, more effective than the post-nuclear struggle itself. Both ramp up the tension in the early stages by staging a minor ground scuffle in the Middle East, encroaching into our characters’ lives via the background chatter of TV and radio reports. As things become more serious and those pesky Ruskies bust their way into West Berlin, the tension mounts.

Threads has its characters stockpiling food and following the advice of the creepy Protect and Survive television broadcasts; The Day After shows our heroes piling earth against their cellar windows, constructing an impromptu fallout shelter in which they can cower until the great American nation rises again (after perhaps a fortnight).

The Day After wins over Threads in one important respect: the beginning of the fateful day itself. This is almost by necessity. The United Kingdom would never have got much of a look-in during a nuclear exchange between the USA and the USSR, neither as a target (Threads has it receiving a mere smattering of the total firepower exchanged) nor as an aggressor, with our nuclear deterrent being both relatively small and lurking aboard submarines somewhere in the world’s oceans. The first nuclear strike in Threads comes with minimal warning, in the early morning when old Reagan would be snoozing. Despite causing pandemonium on the streets, it’s fair to say that the good people of Sheffield don’t stand much of a chance to do anything beyond being typecast, and melting.

The Day After has the luxury of being set in Kansas, home to some of the USA’s nuclear arsenal. The Russians are good enough to make the dubious decision to strike during American daylight hours, giving our characters the opportunity to see their own nuclear warheads heading off to do their duty – and the unpleasant knowledge that, no matter who started it, some Russian missiles will be along to return the favour.

If you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic material, both films are essential, if somewhat crusty viewing. If you have views on the nuclear deterrent or fancy acquiring some, so much the better.