And the next caller is a nutter...

I seem to have been nominated as the official administrator for Ned and Pauls "up Great Britiain" bike ride, I now get early morning phone calls informing me of their intended destination with a request that I book their accomodation for the night - I think they were impressed with the four star hotel that I found on the edge of Loch Lomond for them last night, hope they didn't use the sponsorship money to pay for it.

Todays destination is Speay Bridge which is apparently near to Ben Nevis (see Fort William on map below) so I guess that today will be the highest part of the ride in altitude terms, not that they will be bothered by altitude, riding at less than 4000 feet but still, I hope the hilly bits are nice and steep for them, they sounded far too bright and bubbly this morning.

The attention that they are getting in these no-horse towns also seems to be going to their heads, my other task this morning was to find out what the local radio station is int he highlands and to contact them, giving them Neds mobile number so that they can do an interview, no doubt listened to by four farmers, a couple of bed-ridden old ladies and four hundred cows in their milking stalls, still, if it keeps them happy I've contacted Moray Firth Radio for them, on the slender chance that anyone knows what it is or where the hell it is then you might hear of two nutters on a bike this morning.

Just the hilly bits left then...

Spent a while on the phone and t'interweb this morning with our Ned and Paul who are now in Scotland on the last few days of their Lands End to John o'Groats bike ride.

They spent last night in a cottage just outside Kilmarnock which is just below and to the left of Glasgow on the map above and is in Neds words last night when he rang "a shithole".

Thats the thing with Scotland - its mainly a place of outstanding natural beauty, mainly hilly, sometimes mountainous, often breathtakingly beautiful, a land where the mountains plunge thousands of feet down into deep lakes (lochs), a land of castles and historical conflict and a land that outside of it two main cities is still sparsely populated.

But its also got some shitty little towns where, true to stereotyping, the main occupation of its residents is getting drunk in the absence of anything else to do, such a shitty little one cow town is where they lay their heads last night in a cottage lent to them by a kindly old lady who insisted that she make them a cup of tea - she made them a huge urn of tea and waited until they'd drunk it all and then gave them the keys to the cottage and told them to come back to her house this morning where she'd make their breakfast - they assumed it was her cottage to lend and in any case didn't ask questions.

Today they head for Loch Lomond (marked on map) which is one of the aforementioned beautiful places, some would argue THE most beautiful place in Scotland if not the whole of the UK, a short leg of 45 miles today after yesterdays epic 91 miles whilst trying to find the least shit-iest town to stay in, they rang me with the name of a hotel that they wanted to stay in which is right on the loch itself, I found the telephone number on t'interweb and told them the overnight price, £130 per head, there was a long silence and then Ned asked me to search for some nearby Bed and Breakfast accomodation and text it to him instead, I guess they haven't been staying in the sort of accomodation that I would have chosen had I been mental enough to do the trip with them.

After Loch Lomond its the hilly bits, the bits that us Britons call the "mountains" although if I explained that the highest bit of those hilly bits is only 4400 feet above sea level then we'd hear the laughter from here from Canadians, mid-America and those Europeans for whom The Alps are a backdrop every time they draw back their curtains - final destination the last bit of mainland that you see on that map just above Wick in the top right corner.

They say they are enjoying the ride.

They are madder than I thought.

My brother is a nut

See the map above ?
Thats the British Isles that is.
But you knew that anyway.

See the bit right down in the bottom left hand corner, the bit where the British Isles stops being the British Isles and becomes the Atlantic ?
Thats Lands End that is.

See the bit right up in the top right hand corner of Scotland, the bit where it stops being Scotland and becomes lots of broken up islands instead ?
Thats John O Groats that is.

Inbetween those two points is around 1000 miles of hills, ok so they are little hills and the things we laughingly call mountains would be called "undulations" in areas of Europe and the USA, but they are hills nevertheless, lots of them, all the way up the country.

My brother Ned is currently riding his bicycle from Lands End to John O Groats.
He is a nut.

He and a friend caught the train from Leeds to Penzance (the nearest bit of civilization to Lands End) on Friday and then had to ride the 12 miles from Penzance to the start-off point for the ride, so not content with having to do 1000 miles in two weeks they did an extra 12 as well.

I told you he was a nut.

He rang me yesterday on the third day of their ride to say that they were somewhere in Somerset, three days, three counties covered, about 70 miles a day, I told him again that he was a nut, he agreed.

Then he told me that they had collected money, lots of money on their three days and that a person could actually make a living at this, people keep driving past them, stopping, and then giving them money as they ride past.

They (the two of them) are not doing it for money, its not a charity bike ride its just something that they've alwasy wanted to do and so they've organised it themselves for their own satisfaction, weird isn't it ?

They had some T-Shirts made up for the epic with something like "two nuts on a long bike ride" printed ont he back and this is what is causing all sorts of people to just give them money, just stop and give them money, I don't know who the biggest nuts are.

Neds friend has had to organise a donation to our local hospitals babycare unit as his three kids all required help from them and they are having to stop in towns to find a bank every couple of hours or so to save having to lug around bags of money as well as a fresh pair of underpants and a clean T-Shirt.


Which reminds me...

About 15 years ago I went to France on a cycling/camping expedition with Ned, bear in mind here that at that point he had just returned from his second walking trip around the world where he'd lived out of a backpack for 18 months - I on the other hand was more used to suitcases and four star hotels.

We went for seven days and I packed accordingly and riding down our first French lane after alighting from the ferry at some god-awful early morning time I commented that he appeared to have forgotten our tent. He replied that it was in the left rear panier bag on his bike.

I asked him where he'd packed his sleeping bag then as mine was tied rather intidily across the back of my saddle - his was in the right rear panier bag, likewise upon asking he informed me that the cooking implements were in his left front panier bag and his clothes in the right front one.

There was a long silence.
We rode on for some more miles, or kilometres as we were in France.

He then asked curiously what it was that I had brought in my four panier bags and one handlebar bag.

"Clothes" I said.

He nearly fell off his bike with laughter.

I explained that we were away for seven days which to my mind meant a set of clothes for during the day (the riding of the bike bit) and then a set of clothes for the night (the going out boozing bit), 14 pairs of underpants, 14 pairs of socks, 14 T-shirts, a smattering of pullovers, three pairs of jeans, shoes smart and casual, in fact my whole wardrobe had come on holiday with me, I had probably even packed a suit, just in case you understand.

He actually did fall of his bike laughing at this point.

I asked in a sarcastic way what clothing he had brought with him, him being the travelling globe trotting cleverclogs then, he explained that you carry two of everything, one to wear, one to wash - "wash" I replied startled, "you wash your clothes ?", it was an alien concept to me as I had a wife who did that sort of thing who was waiting at home to greet me in seven days time with the washer already running ready to receive my fourteen sets of dirty clothing.


Its one of the reasons why I wasn't invited on the Lands End to John O Groats bike ride.