In my last post I was just coming to grips with snow when I saw it for the first time in Edinburgh - well it won the first round. First thing I did after leaving my friends house was find a filling station and fill the bikes tank - second thing was to move off and promptly fall over. Turned out the car park at the filling station was like an ice rink; it hadn't been gritted and the first vehicles moving over the snow had melted it and then it had simply re-frozen as ice. Needless to say this didn't do my confidence much good - especially knowing I was currently near sea-level and had the Cairngorms , which rise to over 1200m (4000 feet), to cross that day.
[caption id="attachment_757" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Typical scenery that day. This was down in the lowlands - I didn't take any on the Cairngorms because I was too busy trying to simultaneously keep upright, stay on the road and not get run over by the trucks who seemed to be experiencing little difficulty in the snow."]
[/caption]Anyway after an entertaining days riding I made it over the mountains and back down the otherside to Inverness and thankfully stopped for the night.
[caption id="attachment_758" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="and the next morning awoke to this."]
[/caption]More snow fell overnight - but the forecast was the next couple of days should be snow free before then turning very nasty for a week. So I had to decide whether to turn round now and skip John O'Groats (which probably would have been the sensible option) or do the quick dash now and hope for the best. Being an optimist (or stupid, or more likely a combination of both) I decided on the latter and set off again. It was now about 200 km to John O'Groats and part of me thought with luck I could get there and back in the day.
It wasn't to be - initially progress was fast, the roads close to Inverness were well gritted and had seen a fair amount of traffic - but as I moved north it got worse with the road clear 90% of the time but then when you least expected fresh snow was drifting across the road. This was not fun (well maybe not too bad - I actually found riding on snow OK - its the ice that brings you undone and causes those muscle clenching moments). The fun really ended though when up on one of the high headlands only about 60 kilometres from John O'Groats I stopped to survey a drift and let some traffic through and stalled the bike and it decided it didn't want to restart. Oh b....
In the end I pushed the bike into someones drive and attempted in amongst the snow flurries to find out what was wrong. No spark was easy enough to diagnose - the cause was less obvious and by the end of the afternoon little progress had been made. Throughout this my host Gladys, who was a sprightly 86 year old living 5 miles from the nearest village fed me cups of coffee and sandwiches and didn't seem at all perturbed by my presence.
[caption id="attachment_759" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Gladys - sorry about the out of focus picture."]
[/caption]With me not being able to fix things Gladys set her network in action; she phoned the local Bed and Breakfast to get me accommodation for the night and arranged for the school bus to pick me up and take me there. She also spoke to her daughter who coincidentally was involved with bikes who said "So that's where he is - someone told me they had seen someone mad enough to be riding north today, we wondered if he had got through" proving once again what a small world it is.
Later that night whilst having tea at the local pub I met Robbie a local mechanic who offered to fetch the bike on a trailer to his shed - so the next day that what happened.
[caption id="attachment_760" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Robbies shed"]
[/caption]Anyway in the peace of Robbies shed I was able to work out the problem was simply salt and water-logged electrics and so after a bit of cleaning up the bike was soon up and running again.
[caption id="attachment_761" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Robbie doesn't like bikes - he prefers trikes. This one was built by him , is powered by a 2 litre diesel engine . He generously let me have a go riding it and it was much easier to steer and manoeuvre than its size suggests. Great fun but he failed to convert me."]
[/caption]What the breakdown verified is what I've always believed, it doesn't matter where you are in the world 99% of the people are more than kind hearted and will go out of their way to help you. Thank you Gladys, Robbie and everyone else I met in the village of Dunbeath.
Anyway with the bike running it was off to John O'Groats
[caption id="attachment_762" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="John O'Groats. Don't let the sunshine and lack of snow fool you it was cold there. I have not put on weight during the trip - I'm simply wearing virtually my entire wardrobe."]
[/caption]From John O'Groats it was a rapid dash back to Inverness because the weather was due to change that night and if I didn't get out of far north Scotland then it looked like I might have to stay a week. I rode into Inverness in the tail end of "the worst hurricane in 10 years' (well that's what the news said) as it whipped through the highlands - this certainly added an extra something to the last 20 miles into town - especially over the suspension bridge over the River Ness, in fact this was some of the scariest riding of the trip.
From Inverness it was back over the Cairngorms - more snow but I was getting less worried by it now and onto the Scottish / English border region where I stopped in a small town of Galashiels. I was wellout of the snow by here and the overnight forecast was purely frost.
Unfortunately when I opened my curtains in the morning it was snowing steadily and this is what I saw:
[caption id="attachment_763" align="aligncenter" width="480" caption="Frost - disguised as 6 inches of snow"]
[/caption]All in all it took another 3 hours of very slow riding to get safely clear of the snow and get on the clear road south into England.
From here I've only got a few more days riding via a few friends and relatives until I make it to my fathers house in Swansea, Wales, which is my final destination - but I'll make those days a separate post.
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