LEJOG Day 6 – Hale – Thornhill
Miles 109 | climbing 5117 |9 hours 25 minutes
Today we realise how huge Scotland is. We will cross the border this afternoon, but right now we have not reached the halfway point of the trip overall.
The start of the day was the usual story of Dad trying to get us out of his hair, whilst we messed about in the morning – I was very saddle sore by this time and had decided to change to a spare that I had bought from my mountain bike. My theory was that the saddle was no better than the original, but just different, and it did make a difference and I kept it for the rest of the trip.
We made a navigational error by taking a detour through Kendall shortly into the days ride. This meant a long descent into the town; what goes down then has to go up and we think we could of avoided some of the long climb up onto the top of Shap Summit, the longest single climb of the trip, on the eastern fringe of the Lake District. We celebrated the half way point of the ride about 10 miles in, before getting our heads down for a long slog up Shap.
Once on the top of Shap, a leg of the tour of Britain that was happening at the same time, we were treated to the most exciting leg of the journey – a 50 mile descent to Scotland. We were flying along, but keeping a check on the speed; we’d come too far now to risk success with a fall. Carlisle flashed by and next stop was Gretna Green. I did try proposing to Nick at this point, but Dad put an end to our shenanigans and sent us on our way.
During the afternoon we discussed route tactics. The plan for tomorrow was to take a route via the isle of Arran onto the Mull of Kintyre peninsula, and then North from there but there was a big storm forecast, as the tail of hurricane Katia was coming through.
The point of the Arran route was not just for the scenery, but to avoid the busy Glasgow area – but our fear was that we got on to the island, and then couldn’t get off the other end due to ferry cancelations. We were also planning on doing this part unsupported as the cost of the ferry for the motorhome would of been prohibitive , and we concluded that we had to re-route through the middle of Glasgow. Roshan had also called CalMac the ferry operator and had come to the same conclusion.
So, we arrived in Thornhill and spent some time whist taking our recovery drinks – OK, lager, re routing through Glasgow and saving the new route into our GPS units.