The Not-So-NC500 - a prelim.

WORD OF THE DAY

Stuff (noun) a person’s belongings or baggage; (verb) what you have to do to get all those belongings into a bag far too small for them.

Me and my wee boyfriend Hamish (from Bristol, since you ask!) recently headed off on a bikepacking ‘holiday’ (ha-ha!) in Scotland. Thanks to Covid, mechanical failures and adverse weather, what was initially intended to be the full 830km NC500 route, became a different beast altogether (see our squiggly route below) by the time we circled back into Inverness eight days later. Over the next ten posts, I’ll take you on this undulating journey with us... Clip in, it’s going to be a bumpy ride. 

THE PREP

The trip began as little more than a pipe dream. Wistful conversations as we half-watched documentaries about the Scottish Highlands in our wee London flat. Over the ensuing months, our conversations grew more serious and the planning cranked up a notch. We began reading blogs, watching videos and generally getting extremely excited about tackling the NC500.

I have to fess up here: I am very much an amateur cyclist. I put in the majority of my cycling hours on a traffic light-plagued 8-mile commute from our flat in Tooting to my old job in Victoria over a period of around a year. Other than that, apart from pootling around on holidays as a youngster on ramshackle, rusty mountain bikes, I had only done a handful of bigger leisure rides. There were trips around the Isle of Wight, to Brighton and around Surrey, as well as a few weekend laps of Richmond Park (the easy way round…) thrown in for good measure. But that was it: I really had no experience of marathon rides, and definitely not a trip of this magnitude.

I suppose I have to thank the crazy twists and turns of 2020 for giving me the opportunity to put some serious hours in on the bike. When lockdown began, I almost immediately escaped London – you know, before the armed police descended and cut off all roads in and out of the capital (me and my friends really thought that was going to happen!) I hunkered down, first of all on the edge of the Mendips (hilly) at my boyfriend Hamish’s family home in Farrington Gurney and then (after the allotted 14 days of isolation), I went up North to my family home in the North Yorkshire dales (v.v.v hilly) just outside Barnard Castle (should’ve just asked Dominic for a lift TBH).

Between February and April, I mutated from a cyclist nervous to undertake anything more than 20 miles in one day to one who wouldn’t blink at popping out to do this distance before work, and still be back in time for a morning meeting at 9am (granted, working from home helps). I’m not sure laps of Richmond park – no matter how many I could have crammed in before work every day – would have quite got me to the same place as did weekend rides over Buttertubs Pass (famous from the Tour de France as the ‘Col du Buttertubs’ FYI). That soon taught me what elevation gain means on a ride! These daily rides in the Dales enabled me to achieve the required level of fitness and experience, but also to really discover my love for the sport. Before this, it was much more Hamish’s passion: I just tagged along…

This newfound passion, teamed with an unprecedented level of extra time on my hands, also had an adverse effect on my bank account. I mean I know most of us went there; constantly having 15 shopping tabs open to stave off lockdown boredom and give you that short-lived post-purchase buzz. I started lockdown with one set of cycling kit (jersey and shorts) purchased a year earlier off Light in The Box for about £20; a pair of socks that was gift from my aunty last Christmas; and a cheapo helmet that had the surface area of a large dinner plate. But as my miles on the bike mounted up, so did my cycling wardrobe. I gradually accrued a new helmet, arm warmers, two pairs of shorts, two jerseys, a winter waterproof, two base layers, multi-lens glasses, gloves and a big pack of socks... and my bank account let out a small cry. And this was before we even made an extensive list of the kit, clothing and paraphernalia that we would need for our Scottish expedition. To wit:

Tent

2x Sleeping bags

2x Sleeping mats

Bike bags

Cooking equipment 

Shoe covers

Lightweight locks

Energy Gels

Hydrations tabs

Bungee Cords

Thermals (borrowed from a friend)

Head torch (it never actually got dark enough to use these – the one bit of unnecessary kit we bought)

Mosquito spray (pretty useless against the West Coast swarms)

Power bank

Short charging cables (not that necessary, but our usual phone charging cables are like 2m long and unnecessarily bulky)

And I thought this was going to be a relatively cheap holiday… HA! 

THE TEST RUN

Bikes prepped. Tick! Equipment gathered together. Tick! It was time to test all that – and our fitness levels – out, so the weekend before we left, we decided to do a wee (sorry – it must be the Scottish influence!) one-night test run. We wanted to make sure we could fit everything in our bags, that we weren’t missing anything major off the pack list, and that we could even move the bike once it was fully laden. 

On the first evening of campsites opening back up in England, we packed up and headed for Hever Campsite, just over 30 miles away in Kent. This overnighter taught me four things: #1 Hamish doesn’t understand tents; #2 A 2-man tent isn’t big enough for two people; #3 Don’t scrimp when purchasing your gas stove – bringing a cup of water to the boil would have been quicker using matches or the power of the sun than our Decathlon £15 stove; #4 Packing up your camp in the morning is the most arduous part of the whole thing. Despite not sleeping too well – mainly due to the aforementioned limited sleeping space, gale force winds throughout the night and the fact that this was the first night Hamish had ever spent in a tent – the trip was pretty successful and we were back, showered and at our WFH desks for our morning calls by 9am the next day (with an order for a new gas stove on its way).

The day of reckoning arrived and on the 12th of July, after a few brief bickerings as we struggled to squeeze everything into our bike bags, we headed for Euston… Ahh, here we go!... setting off from our flat at 5pm for a 9pm sleeper train. We grabbed a burger and a pint in central #nutrition #health – to see us on through the night, with an ETA in Inverness of 8am the next morning. Due to the Covid restrictions, our train had no buffet or seating car and we were confined to our cabins for the duration. I don’t know if any of you have been on a sleeper train? Granted, we were in a budget cabin, but calling it cramped would be a severe understatement. It was nigh on impossible to fit two (nearly) fully-grown adults in there – contortions were called for – but despite the excitement, a v. loud, v. jolty journey and the fact that my nose was practically touching the cabin ceiling (I thought I’d be oh-so smart and shotgunned the top bunk ffs!), we got some fitful sleep ahead of the next day – day 1 on the bikes! 

Thanks for coming exploring with me!
Have you got time for a little more? Click here for The Not-So-NC500 - Day 1

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