Having stayed on-board a train carriage in Rogat, near the Glenmorangie distilling region, I think everyone had enjoyed the unique experience, and were about to have another on this the final day of the ride. I think everyone also had a fairly decent night’s sleep, probably helped by the bottle of Glenmorangie and a few rounds of cards while The Prodigy and The Black Seeds played on The Stig’s laptop. Not quite decent enough, perhaps, to prepare us for the day ahead, which I’ll now recount in reverse order for reasons which will hopefully become apparent:
Half way there, at Bettyhill, on the north coast, we stopped for lunch in the second of two very closed-looking (but open) pubs. It was run by a couple from Kent, and the food, although not the most exciting or nutritious, as Matt said, did the job of filling the belly before what would be a very demanding ride. I took extra precaution in how many snacks, sweets and bananas I crammed into my bag and pockets, and like Mark W, I don’t think I stopped eating the whole way there. This was a different challenge altogether, having already ridden fifty miles, but still having the same again to travel. And nothing of the final explosive heroics of the Kirkstone Pass climb here; rather a long, slow, punishing final push against the strongest headwind we had faced. We had to pedal hard on the steep downhills, is what I mean. And my gooch was killing me. Roughly four hours later, at 8.15pm, we crossed the finish line at John o’ Groats, welcomed in by Stu, legend that he is, with a bottle of champagne. In terms of how people carried on till the end, Matt and Adam seemed to be suffering the most, so fair play to them for going along with the longest of two route options, which was decide on by a majority vote that morning.
At least an hour later than the planned departure, as it was every morning, we were still outside Spar, eating nuts and discussing which direction to ride. Again there were the two normally most outspoken on this matter, Matt and Mark W, the ones with the skills and research. Though the previous days’ discussions had been extremely heated at times, today was more of a hesitant atmosphere, as the two or three options available to us had been outlined the night before, but the decision hadn’t been made because of mixed feelings. As I remember there was roughly twenty miles difference in the two routes it had been narrowed down to, the shortest being the A road almost all the way, up the east coast and the longest being over a hundred miles on roads similar to those we had chosen so far. Oh my gooch, the longest ride yet on the final day. Fitting, in a way, as none of us had ever done over a hundred miles in a day to my knowledge.
So the vote went down and the hands went up, no more fannying around. Four of us raised our hands for the longer journey and there were only seven riders, so that settled it. And were we in for a treat. Our start saw us continue up the road we’d come in on to the train station, and at once the view ahead was awesome – in the truly original sense; this was a part of the world where the slang we use daily in our cool cities was unnecessary. In fact, although I will try here (and it’s a big cliché to finish the big ride), words really can’t describe what we saw and felt on the first half of the final day. Blue skies and golden sunlight above the very view you’ll see at the top of this web page. At this stage the group was still split on the route, and this displayed itself physically, with large gaps in the pelaton and very few words uttered for a half hour or so. Moody. Then people started to realise that they were travelling at a beautiful pace, downhill with the wind behind them for miles and miles, following a path adjacent to a shallow, rushing river, sparkling and white above the rocks. The tyres trod the road with more ease than any previous leg of the tour, and we covered thirty odd miles, it seemed, without pedalling. The river, of course, led to the loch. Loch Naver, with open rolling scenery on both sides and a distinct lack of houses or sheep, which added a deeper peace to the area than any other day. The whole experience was so unexpected, so new, and as Mark W shouted at the top of his lungs, just when you thought it couldn’t get any better… there was another swoop, another tailwind-assisted corner and this was surely the biggest smiley of the trip. I’d go so far as to say this was the happiest I’ve been all year. Meena would’ve absolutely loved it too, and whether there is anything in these feelings you have about the dead or not, it was the closest I’ve come to actually believing she was with me on some level.
Stopping for a sip of whiskey every now and then, or to look out across the loch while Adam took one of his four hundred photographs to document Land’s End to John o’ Groats more comprehensively than ever before, added far more to the journey than battling it out with the trucks and the climbs of the A road alternative, and I think we were all glad we chose that route. As the river widened and we saw a gap in the mountains which had to be the sea, we got closer to our end point. The end was described by all as an anticlimax, arriving in the dark, cold, body in shock from breaking triple figure milleage, having to break the bikes down there in the street to transport them back to the hotel: it was like the demoralising feeling packing your instruments away at the end of a gig gives you. But the first half of the day made up for it a hundred times over, and was worth every bit of pain. Personally I dealt with some of the worst physical pain of my life on this trip – more painful than the tightening of my lungs in an asthma attack, more painful than cutting my leg open on the corner of a brick wall – but then I’ve been lucky, and what I kept trying to tell myself was that it was nothing compared to what Meena went through. Confined to a bed specially designed to keep the pressure off the tumours in her spine, she couldn’t walk, broke her hip in a panic attack, got pneumonia from the journey to hospital to get it X-rayed and at the very end lost the ability to make herself understood, while I was holding her hand and desperately trying to tell her the best things I could, knowing that she wouldn’t ever respond again. Never do I think I’ll experience that sort of pain.
If this post and this journey inspires you to do nothing else, please donate whatever you can to Breakthrough Breast Cancer, so that human kind can have a better chance against this most common and deadly form of the disease. Thank you.
Dylan
