Rain! The last thing I was hoping to see, yet when I stepped off the train at Inverness it was falling from the sky by the bucketful. Luckily, it didn’t last too long and the weather satisfied itself with looking mean and moody for the first part of the ride.
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!
