The forecast sounded promising for today, but we awoke to steady rain. The original plan had been to take a forest track along the west side of Loch Lochy, but the wet weather meant we instead took the A82. At the Commando Memorial, Dan and I diverted along a scenic and empty road, to Gairlochy, entering Fort William via Neptune’s Staircase. Anna meanwhile was suffering badly with her knees, so carried along the main road to Fort William, before taking a rest day.
Dan and I headed south of Fort William, down the increasingly busy A82 and through a heavy rain storm. At Glencoe Village both the weather and traffic improved considerably. We went along a rolling minor road and stopped for lunch at the famous Clachaig Inn. Stopped for over two hours actually, which was not great as we’d already started two hours late.
Then it was a gentle climb up through Glencoe, across Rannoch Moor, and back up to Tyndrum, all in sunshine but with a very strong crosswind – I got blown off the road a couple of times by passing traffic. The crosswind turned to a strong (40kph?) headwind but we still kept the pace up at around 23/24kph.
At Tyndrum we met the girls and discovered we were about to miss the last ferry of the day to Inversnaid. So we biked almost to the south end of Loch Lomond while the others drove an exhausting 250km round trip to pick us up. The unplanned 25km extra we did ourselves proved to be very tiring. We eventually arrived at the rather magical Inversnaid Bunkhouse at. Just after 10pm where a hot meal was waiting.
164.3pm in 6hr53 moving time – 23.8kph average. 10.5 hours altogether.
