LEJOG Day 10 – Drumnadrochit – John O’Groats
Miles: 128 |Climbing 5657ft | 11 hours 43 minutes
We thoroughly enjoyed the drive up the hill to last nights drop off point, grateful that we didn’t have start the day with this climb. Fresh legs powered us quickly back towards the coast. The route we took cut the corner over the mountains – a flatter alternative would of been to continue to Inverness along the canal, but this would add many miles. As we joined the coastline at Dingwall we thought we’d stumbled across the war of he worlds – this large protected bay was clearly the car park for the North Sea oil industry, with many rigs being stored there. Passing the Dornoch Bridge, the wind was becoming a problem, especially on the bridges that cross the deep ravines. We had a good boost mid morning however – the first signpost we’d seen for John O’Groats! We lost contact with Roshan somehow and just kept pushing northwards until we got back together again in Dunbeath, but the wind was now at the point of being unrideable. The nearby weather station at Wick airport was showing 40 knots of breeze with 60 knot gusts (force 11). We finally gave up just 22 miles short of the target and sat in the van making plans for the next day.
But then at around 6PM the wind just died, the sun came out, and it was like a completely different day within 30 minutes. We were off to John O’Groats!
Around a mile out of John O’Groats there is viewpoint that looks down on the village and we stopped briefly to take it in, before we crossed the finish line at 7:37 PM. 9 days, 4 hours and 37 minutes. It was an incredible feeling of achievement, and was particularly poignant and emotional as it would of been our friends birthday, the reason for wanting to finish today.
John O’Groats was deserted when we got there and even the official signpost had been taken down for the night, so the photo below was missing the main part of the sign!
The champagne that Roshan had kindly bought us didn’t last long, and we then had a long drive back down the coast to Brora where we managed to find ourselves in a restaurant with no license – we were not expecting to have our last night drinking coke but that was the way it turned out!
The best feeling of achievement was to come the next morning. We had an early start to drive back home to West Sussex, and we saw a team of riders heading North, somewhere around Inverness. Remember the Navy guys from Cornwall?
Next page – our LEJOG GPX Files