In addition to the dedication to sampling local ales, we tried to partake of local/regional food wherever possible. Not quite as successful, but we did manage the following:

Scottish Shortbread – all through Scotland
Scotch Pies – wherever we found them
Oatcakes – Muir of Ord
Haggis (and chips) – Fort William
Isle of Skye Black Pudding – Glencoe
Bridies – New Cumnock
Assorted Jalfrezi’s – Gourock
Kendall mintcake – Kendall
Filled Yorkshire Puds -Warrington (well it’s close-ish)
Cornish Pasties – Land’s End

Unfotunately didn’t stop in Chorley for Chorley cakes…..

Part of our challenge incorporated the need to replenish liquids and carbohydrates. There is no better way to do this than that old British faithful – beer!. In the spirit of the journey, we made a serious effort to sample local ales wherever possible.
This wasn’t always so easy to achieve, but special mention goes to two places in particular:
Firstly, the Claghaig Inn in Glencoe (the village that is, not the vale of Glen Coe). They had a fantastic range of ales (we duly sampled the lot), confusingly renamed for the night with ridiculous Aussie titles, to complement the Aussie folk band who entertained us so well.
Secondly Base Camp Monmouth, where Paul had gone to lengths to search out some local bottled ales for us to relax with (credit also to the policies of the Waitrose Beer buyers in supporting local breweries – just as important as supporting local farmers in my book)

Anyway, here’s the list for any beer addicts to salivate over:

Deuchars IPA (Caledonian Brewery)
Tennents Ember 80/- (Wellpark, Glasgow)
Red Cuillin (Isle of Skye Brewing Company)
Tradewinds ( Cairngorm Brewery, Inverness)
Black & Tan (Houston Brewing Co., Houston, Renfrewshire)
Seven Giraffes (Williams Bros. Brewing Co. Alloa)
Skye light (Isle of Skye Brewing Company)
Rambo the Mighty Midge (Houston Brewing Co., Houston, Renfrewshire)
Peter’s Well (Houston Brewing Co., Houston, Renfrewshire
Belhaven Best (Belhaven Brewery)
Ball’s Up – Tirril Brewery, Cumbria
Traditional Cumberland Ale – Jennings Brewery, Cockermouth
Bombardier (Charles Wells)
Cotleigh Kiwi (Cotleigh Brewery, Wiveliscombe, Somerset)
Wye Valley HPA (Wye Valley Brewery, Stoke Lacy, Herefordshire)
Ludlow Best (Ludlow Brewing Co.)
Butty Bach (Wye Valley Brewery, Stoke Lacy, Herefordshire)
Wild Hare (Bath Ales, Warmley, Bristol)
Dorothy Goodbody’s Country Ale (Wye Valley Brewery, Stoke Lacy, Herefordshire)
1503 (Kingstone Brewery, Tintern, Monmouth )
Barnstormer (Bath Ales, Warmley, Bristol)
Classic Bitter (Kingstone Brewery, Tintern, Monmouth )
Hobgoblin (Wychwood Brewery, Witney, Oxfordshire)
Lizard Bitter (Lizard Ales, St Keverne, Lizard peninsula)
Doom Bar (Sharps Brewery, Rock, Cornwall)

Ian sampled two local malts in Lochmaben (sorry, dinna ken the names) and when times were hard, we made do with Stella, Murphy’s, Strongbow & Kronenburg. A job well done I reckon……..

Hi all, incase you were after more photographic proof of our escapades I’ve just uploaded a big batch of photo’s to our flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28276768@N06/

Yes, we finally completed our self set task by all successfully completing the BUPA Great Capital 10k run in Hyde park yesterday. Despite a full set of achilles, ankle and knee problems we all somehow actually managed to run it, and all in quite respectable times too…. quite amazing really.
Pictorial proof will follow shortly, which I’ll leave up to David’s technical wizardry.

For the record, we set off from John o’Groats at 6am on Sunday 6th July and reached our destination at land’s End at 11:28 on Wednesday 16th. 10 days, 5 hours 28 mins later. A grand total of 1017.88 miles, 87 hours of actual cycling and an average moving speed of 11.7mph. Way too many hills to accurately recall……

Highest point reached was Shap summit, a smidgeon over 1400 ft. Lowest point, possibly Ian’s 8th puncture, in the rain, somewhere around Dumfries!

Fastest speed achieved collectively, 35 mph, on the downhill approach to Milton, near Drumnadrochit and Castle Urqhart on the north side of Loch Ness. Would have been a lot quicker if the gps wasn’t on my bike and I’m a bit of a coward when it comes to hurtling down hills, with S bends, in the rain, on skinny tyres, with half a hundredweight on the back. I recall descending all the way down from Shap summit with my brakes hard on, spray everywhere, and still doing about 30… Ian may well have been faster down some descents.
I did record 40.6 briefly on a madcap late night dash to Heads of Ayr campsite, in total darkness, but thats another story.

Lowest speed…… lots of 5mph’s up lots of hills!

I’m now hobbling around like the geriatric old man I’m fast becoming (the run has finished off my achilles tendon properly), but was it worth it?. Of course it was!

…more info on the way

We are starting this post with a lot of thank you’s. Firstly to all those that have sponsored us so far I believe the totaliser now stands at around 1,500 which is really amazing. Now the people that have helped us on the way. Ian would like to thank the sheep that so kindly led him along the road. We’d all like to thank Lowther Holiday Park who kindly gave us free accommodation tonight, excellent facilities already we feel rejuvenated. Ian’s friend Martin and family have been brilliant letting us crash one night, feeding us and getting us up to john o’groats in the first place. We would also like to thank the Taj Mahal restaurant in Gourock who let us park our bikes in the restaurant to eat our dinner, they also serve really good food. We will post links of their websites soon.

Today’s leg was supposed to be a gentle 100 miles but somehow we managed to cram in 150 miles. We set off nice and early waking at 5am and leaving at 6. First on our list of to-do’s was Dunnet head, the most northerly point in mainland Britain. We got there and guess what? … it was foggy, very foggy so much so that really we could have taken our photo’s anywhere but I can vouch we definitely were there. On exiting it was here we had our first accident of the trip.

Mark (Dad) slipped on the cattle grid and got his tyre caught in the rails causing him to come off his bike. Mum, don’t panic, it was at very low speed and Dad will deny that he actually crashed at all his bike just ‘fell over’. Luckily that was the only incident… well almost. We then continued on, trying to find the road in the fog. We were going well and then came the turning for Scrabster, “down here” shouts Dad. As the route bearer and we trusted him, down a long hill, “hurrah some down hill at last” … “oh a roundabout” … “oh this is a dead end” … arghh!! … never mind it wasn’t too far we just had to reclimb the minor mountain we had just come down. Then we were back on the right road, I soon started to feel really tired and was steadily getting further from the leader. Eventually I asked for a quick drink stop and managed to scoff enough energy boosting short bread to boost my energy levels. We then started to encounter hills, quite a lot of them. It slowed us all down but we kept going. The toughest of these was Bettyhill, it was huge and vast, it nearly killed Ian (his words). We were rewarded though at the end we found a pastie shop and got two each, along with a strong cofee. After this we hit a nice long stretch along a river it was a nice relief after the mountains we had just passed. After about 20 miles that was over and we were back to hills/mountains. We made it to Lairg where had planned to stop for the night. It was only 3ish so we thought we’d grab some food and decide if we wanted to plug on. We had a really nice dinner/lunch and the lady who run the place was really helpful which convinced us to plug on. In the back of our minds we hoped we could make it to Ian’s friends house. Which we did, so a total trip of 150 miles giving us a 40 mile boost on tomorrows journey (10 miles down due to wrong turns etc.). I could write a lot more but I am so tired, check out Flickr for our latest photo’s. Here’s one or two…

A long trip but well worth it. Despite David jeopardising timing by developing a puncture coming home from work, we left Euston at 21:15 and were pleasantly suprised to have been greeted by ScotRails management, and upgraded to cattle class on the Orient Express.

A can or two of Caledonian Deuchars IPA smoothed the journey.

For a moment we thought we had arrived in Istanbul at 08:30 on Saturday 5th but were greeted by a local Scot named Martin.

Although Martin couldn’t carry our luggage, He was more than accomodating in loading our bikes to his four wheeled Chariot named Zafira, He drove like a demon to a local burger bar where we replenished our malnourished stomachs with cheese and bacon burgers. This lasted approximately forty minutes whereby we stopped for a further fill, a compliment of coffee and Scotch pies. £5.68 for 4 coffees and 4 scotch pies, Starbucks eat your heart out!

On arrival, after the mandatory snaps by the signpost, erecting our temporary homestead, etc. we departed to the local hostelry to sample their culinary fare, along with 3 pints of Stella, 5 pints of Tennents Ember and a pint of Murphy’s.

Carbo loading completed, we stocked up with further nutritional supplies, like cut price shortbread, and chocolate eclairs. We are now going to plan tomorrows drinking… I mean journey… our provisional plan is to wake early and get as many miles in the bag as possible. So what do you reakon we’ll manage, answers on the comments section please.