Day 18 – 22nd April 2007
Our host, Mike, had washed and dried a load of washing for us, for which we were very grateful. We found that Mike was a very accomplished hill walker, having conquered all 284 Munros*, so I’m sure he has had a lot of practice at drying wet clothes.
We set off rather later than we intended, after 10am, but we made very good progress along Loch Ness, dropping in to Urquhart Castle for a coffee. Normally this would have been out of the question because the entry fee to the castle was £6.30 per adult and you had to buy a ticket to gain access to the café. However, for the weekend fo 21st-22nd April, many of Scotland’s historical attractions were opening their doors free. So we had a coffee and a cake without bothering ourselves with the castle.
Shortly came the major climb of the day, heading north from Drumnadrochit up to Convinth Glen. This was long and steep, and Janet and I pushed the bike for about 3/4 of a mile. Eventually we caught up with Chris, who was waiting by a small loch with his lunch. Although pushing the tandem up a long 1 in 6 had been hard work, when we were at the top the wind was cold. We were keen to make a move and the descent towards Beaulieu was great fun, as once again Janet and I broke our speed record: 46.2mph. This hill was not especially steep, just very, very long, but if you cannot build up a bit of pace when descending from the Highlands, when can you?
I recall a saying quoted to me when I visited Elgin VAT office with Customs & Excise years ago: “Speak well of the highlands, but live in the Laich”, the Laich being the stretch of coastline between Nairn and Elgin which has a particularly mild climate. I don’t think that Beaulieu, the Muir of Ord or Conan Bridge can be correctly be called the Laich, but we all noticed how much warmer we felt at the lower level.
We had a brief explore of Dingwall Town Centre but there’s not much going on at 5pm on a Sunday. We climbed to the minor road to avoid the busier, lower route and I decided it was time to do something about the wheel buckle which has been annoying us for a couple of days. I found the spoke key, tried to adjust a spoke or two in the offending part of the wheel and found a completely loose spoke, still attached at the nipple end. But the spoke wasn’t broken – the hub was! A piece of metal about an inch long had broken off my precious Rohloff hub!
This is definitely a tour-threatening situation. If another spoke on the rear wheel or, more to the point, another chunk of hub were to break off, I would be most reluctant to ride.
When we reached our accommodation, the Commercial Hotel, a fairly unpleasant place with no real ale and a very restricted food menu, I set to work trying to superglue the offending piece of hub back into place, but with little success.
We visited the local Indian for our evening meal, and the place might well have been called Balti Towers as the service was very slow and the apologies profuse, the woman blaming her husband for the tardiness of the meal. Eventually the food arrived and it was very good, although at the end we were treated on a discourse on how to provide low-fat Indian food to Scotsmen.
We returned to our hotel and I made another attempt to glue the piece of hub back into its place. There will be phone calls to Bridgewater in the morning and I can see the headlines in Der Zeitung: “Rohloffhub in LandsendtoJohnoGroatenfahren kaput ist!”
*It would appear that the number of Munros is a moveable feast, as it were. At the time of re-writing this some 17 years after the event, it seems that the Scottish Mountaineering Club now recognise 282 Munros. I wondered if two of them have worn out.