The Not-So-NC500 - Day 4

WORD OF THE DAY

Frayed (adjective) with the threads at the edge (e.g. cable) coming loose or, used to describe someone's mood when they are feeling worried, upset, or annoyed.

Ullapool > Lairg 
Emma's Strava Effort

GUYS – WE GOT BREAKFAST IN BED. I don’t think I’ve ever had breakfast in bed. I’m pretty sure the tray here was bigger than my bed at home. Heaven! Croissants. Cereal. Fruit. Coffee (happy Hamish)!

Over breakfast we discussed the vast difference between our current state of mind and body to that of the previous mornings, puffy, smelly, tetchy, soggy… Now what happens next has had mixed reactions. I’ll let you decide for yourselves if it was pathetic, admirable or somewhere in between. Right there in bed, over breakfast we booked Airbnbs for every other night of the trip. I then packed up all of our camping gear and we posted it home from the Post Office just up the road (bar cooking equipment – you never know when you’ll need a warm something to fill you up). And that was that the end of our camping stint of the trip, and I never looked back.

In the Post Office, camping gear half stuffed into a cardboard box, we came across the Leeds blokes biking the NC500. We were actually too embarrassed at this point to stop and chat – thinking they might scoff at this major cop-out – so we snuck out without them seeing... hopefully.

Spirits high, bags 3kg lighter, we said a fond farewell to Ullapool and hopped on our bikes. The booking of accommodation also meant we had to cut inland and off the NC500 route, but we’d already left it behind once and were less precious about sticking to the prescribed path now. Another reason was that, despite Scotland shelving strict lockdown and with campsites and accommodation now open, many still chose not to on the sparse west coast. So, we followed the coast road for a little while North, soon hitting a long climb. Something I hope I've put over about this trip was that despite the hard, long hills you come up against every day in the saddle, you don't feel like giving up; the utterly magnificent scenery (which we could see properly now the weather had faired up) takes your mind off the pain.

Once we passed Ledbeg, we cut inland and had a more or less flat or downhill section for the next 18 or so miles. Dreamy. Inland, the scenery becomes less dramatic, but much vaster and more deserted. We passed only a couple lorries between Ledbeg and Lairg. It was lovely being able to bomb it down the deserted roads without angry coastal traffic fighting to get past you. It’s also a much more sociable state to be biking along in – side by side, rather than tucked behind one another.

Going up the final ascent towards Lairg, I heard a strange noise in the woods next to the road. I will admit I do have a rather overactive imagination, but I honestly think it was a bear. For the next few miles, I kept anxiously checking over my shoulders and wouldn’t let Hamish stop for snacks (lol - if went cycling somewhere more exotic than Scotland, I’d be a mess). Hamish had let me have the Wahoo on my bike that day, and as we neared our destination, I was so busy staring at the screen that I almost veered off the tarmac down quite a drop into the wheel-buckling verge. Some death-defying manoeuvres kept me on the road by a hair-width's margin. Once I had stopped laughing – you know, the type of laugh when your car aquaplanes and you realise you’re still alive – I handed the Wahoo back to Hamish.

We made it to Lairg at around 3pm, ravenous, and headed straight to a café Hamish had scoped out the night before. It was mint. We bagged a table seat in their back garden overlooking Loch Shin, ordered some food pronto (plus extra chips, always) and enjoyed the best coffees we had had all trip. After bagging some sweet treats for dessert later that evening, we popped to the Spar en route to our stopover.

The Airbnb was a glorified shed at the end of someone’s garden, no cooking equipment, just a microwave. Thank goodness we's kept the camp stove or all our ingredients for that evening's curry would have gone to waste! That day my back gears had been giving me a bit of trouble – not wanting to shift and my shifter had been growing quite stiff, so as I morphed into curry cook, Hamish tinkered with my bike. He asked me to pop out and help with various things every now and again, but then everything went a bit quiet. After a long, quiet while, he sheepishly appeared in the ‘kitchen’. “Emma, it’s fucked.” Now, I admit I could have handled the next half an hour a little better…. but I was tired, we had 85 miles ahead of us the next day and now my gears wouldn't shift at all. So, I cried. And told Hamish to never touch my bike again. Helpful.

We had seen a group of bikepackers setting up camp nearby earlier that evening and, as luck would have it, as we were having this little meltdown they came past, I wiped away my tears, ran over and asked “do any of you know how to fix bikes?”.  The diagnosis: a frayed gear cable. Solution: a new gear cable. The nearest gear cable: 10 miles South (we were heading North). They couldn’t do anything further to help, so left us to work out our plan of action.

Can I just add in here? The week before the trip Hamish was in charge of doing last-minute mechanical work on the bikes (no, he wouldn’t let me take it into a shop, he could do it all himself). The front gear cable needed replacing, so he did that. I said, “Shall we just do the other one while we’re at it?” So, we – together! – traipsed to Halfords and bought a gear cable and casing for the back. I was under the impression that this had been used. APPARENTLY NOT. And I found this out. In Lairg. With a broken bike gear cable. (Also, skipping into the future, a month down the line, I have had to bring my bike into the shop as Hamish is away and they have just told me that the front gear cable is now FUBARD because he didn’t bother to change the casing, which I thought he had done). But I’m not angry. No. Not angry. Half-job Hamish fml.

We found a bike shop in Bonar Bridge, which was a short train journey away but would add 10 miles to our 85-miles the next day. The trains only ran twice a day, so we didn’t have the option of getting the bike fixed then getting the train back to Lairg. But it was our only option, so we ate our curry and sweet treat we had bought earlier in the café (sitting at opposite ends of the sofa), and got ready for bed.

Thanks for coming exploring with me! 
Have you got time for a little more? Click here for the Not-So-NC500 - Day 5

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