Up bright and early, with lovely blue sky with puffy white clouds scudding across! Set off eastwards, initially flat, but then climbing through woodland, with plenty of rhododendrons.  After a while, we emerged onto rather bare mountainous landscape.

We reached Achnasheen at about 11.30am, and stopped at the cafe for paninis and tea. Pressing on, we eventually started a gentle descent through woodland. We were aware of big black clouds, and as we approached the main road to Inverness at Gorstan, we had the first proper drenching of the tour so far. It was fortunately quite short-lived, as the rain was pretty cold!

We woke after a well-earned sleep, for an 8am breakfast.  The plan for today was to ride over to Lochcarron, a short day in mileage terms, but one packed with steep climbs, particularly on the south side of Lochcarron (of which more later).
We rode off towards the Skye Bridge on a rather undistinguished road.  Snce the bridge was built, it seems to me that the character of the motor traffic has changed, if not the character of the island.  Stll, it afforded some good views of Skye and the mainland.  The bridge itself is surprisingly steep, but quite manageable. 

Once back on the mainland, we paused to look at the map. Being a bit fed up with the mainroads we'd been on since Lochailort on the previous day, we decided to take the winding and quite arduous unclassified roads from Kyle of Lochalsh, through several villages to rejoin the main road above Stromeferry. This route takes you through delightful broadleaf woods with cuckoos calling (and less fortunately midges, though at this time of year they're not too much of a problem).  We briefly stopped at Plockton station for a cuppa, but found the restaurant there had closed down.  We stopped to brew up teas a little further down the road, by a patch of woodland with a bunch of cows - they seemed to find us fascinating and came to have a fair old nosey-parker!

Our sojourn at the excellent Salen Hotel ended with the finest breakfast of the trip. Everything about it exuded quality - bacon, scrambled eggs (on a potato scone), mushrooms, sausage (their own recipe) and Stornoway black pudding set me up famously. But before that, I'd been out to sort the gears - turned out the indexing was way out of whack.

The weather this morning was glorious - sunshine and clouds, but a bit cooler than of late. The road over to Lochailort features quite a bit of climbing (before the biggest climb, over to Loch Ailort, we were hailed by a bunch of sea kayakers) but the roads were splendid, leading us through fabulous woodland. As we approached Lochailort, we spotted a steam train heading for Mallaig, emitting vast clouds of smoke.

After breakfast, we rolled the bike down the B&B's extraordinarily steep driveway, and then rode it down the hill into Tobermory and on to the ferry jetty on the harbour.  From there, we took the ferry across the Sound of Mull to Kilchoan in Ardnamurchan. 

We'd decided to nip over to the beach at Sanna before heading to Salen (or possibly Acharacle, depending on how we felt).  So we rode over the hills to Sanna Bay, where we were rewarded by a virtually empty beach composed of glorious silver sands - here we had a drum up. On the walk over to the beach we walked past former crofting fields, with streams populated with a variety of small wildlife, and with butterworts growing around the banks.  We were also rewarded with spectacular views of some of the Inner Hebrides (Coll etc).

We woke to see sun and clouds, and this later cleared to give clear skies and, yes, more hot weather! However this did make for an excellent day of cycling on Mull, an island we'd not visited in about 15 years.

On a weekday morning, Oban is mighty busy, and getting to the ferry was a little awkward (and I even made a wrong turn in the 0.75 miles from the B&B to the ferry terminal!). Once there, we bought tickets (one of the 'Island Hopsctoch' tickets) and embarked, along with many others, including 6 coaches - everyone seemed to be heading for Iona.

The day began and finished with cloudless blue skies - for much of the day, we had puffy white clouds. Unfortunately this didn't lessen the temperature, and part way through today's ride, I had to stop wearing my helmet as a consequnce of the torrents of sweat pouring out of it. We decided to try and reach Oban today, a distance of over 70 miles, much of it on main trunk roads.
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For me, the day began lethargically, and it wasn't until Kenmore that we were rolling effectively. Kenmore lacks B&Bs, though there's a good tearoom (closed when we passed), a hotel, and a number of what looks like holiday cottages. We paused at Kenmore to take a few photographs, in cluding one looking across to the Loch Tay Crannog Centre, featuring a reconstruction of a crannog, a prehistoric settlement built on a platform on stilts over water.  From Kenmore, we pressed on via the road on the north side of Loch Tay - this is a fair bit easier the that on the south side, which is a recommended cycle route. There's not much accomodation to be had other than the Lawers Hotel until you get to Killin, where there are plenty of B & Bs. En route to Killin, we passed a Google Streets photography car, though judging from the speed it was doing, we doubt it was active.Along the way,the landscape was excellent, with high mountains to our right (for example Ben Lawers) and the glassy smooth waters of Loch Tay to our left. 

After a cream tea in tearoom at Killin, we set forth with an expected 55 miles or so to still to cover (this was at 12.00, with 23 miles already on the clock). Next point was Crianlarich, followed soon after by Tyndrum - neither are particularly interesting, but do offer food and accommodation, mostly aimed at the climbing fraternity. For the rest of the day, we contented ourselves with bananas and snack bars, washed down with warm water from our bottles (vaguely plasticky tasting after two days in the heat). At one point, we paused for Carol to relieve her hot feet in a stream, in order to stave off foot cramps.

After excellent hospitality in Tayport, we set off just after 9.00am towards Dundee, in spetacular brilliant sunshine. Crossing the Tay Bridge, the Tay estuary looked particularly beautiful, particularly with the backdrop of the Braes of the Carse behind it.

The bridge itself offers a descent for about 2 miles, and the traffic was comparatively light. Once in Dundee, it's relatively easy to scoot off the bridge and round past the rail station and Discovery Point, then onwards into countryside through Invergowrie to Kingoodie.

This story came across my radar this morning (Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension).  This seems bad news to me, and exemplifies one aspect of Microsoft's software model that I really rather dislike in comparison to, for example, how Ubuntu rolls out its updates.

Turns out this Firefox add-on, which is installed rather stealthily as part of a regular Windows .NET update, has its uninstall option disabled, which means Windows users need to go through a complex process to remove this, as described at annoyances.org (Remove the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (ClickOnce) Firefox Extension).  Annoyances.org says:

This event saw the return of Team Grumpy to the NBRC club time trial scene. Unfortunately, this wasn't accompanied by nice time trialling weather.

I rode to work on the Cougar TT bike, in pretty steady rain.  It wasn't until I got there that I discovered that I'd not brought my racing aero helmet.  well, that was annoying, but not terminal.  During the course of the day, the rain eased, but the wind seemed to build up so that it was considerably stronger than the 15 mph forecast by the BBC.

I was unfortunate enough to see the BNP's party political broadcast last night on TV.  I am not sure of what the rules for such broadcasts are, but in terms of pure misrepresentation of historical fact and by sailing pretty close to the wind on stirring up racial prejudice, it was a pretty nasty piece of work.

Nick Griffin portrayed the Second World War as having been won by (exclusively) white christian Brits.  Never mind the millions of Soviet citizens, never mind the Poles and the Czechs, never mind our colonial troops of various races and nationalities, never mind the US military, never mind all the others, why should the BNP let a little bit of historical fact get in the way of their vile outpourings?  I hope more of the public care about the truth.

I am planning on posting updates to this website while on cycle tour, in which I will describe our progress around Scotland.  In a classic Baldrick style,  I have a cunning plan.  This plan entails taking my little OQO handheld WinXP device (left).  Of course this is a pretty creaky little machine, and the keyboard won't lend itself to particularly lengthy write-ups, but still, I should be able to keep updated with our progress round the planned itinerary.  Ideally I'll be able to upload images as well.

This all depends crucially on whether I can get the Vodafone mobile broadband USB stick to behave (and indeed on finding a reasonably quick connection in the wilderness).  You can see the truly Baldrickian nature of this cunning plan emerging, I think...

Our paper describing a new allele of the Drosophila WRN-like exonuclease DmWRNexo  and on it's biochemical characterisation is finally out in print (its been available online for some time):

Boubriak, I., Mason, P. A., Clancy, D. J., Dockray, J., Saunders, R. D. C., Cox. L. S. 92009) DmWRNexo is a 3′–5′ exonuclease: phenotypic and biochemical characterization of mutants of the Drosophila orthologue of human WRN exonuclease.  Biogerontology   10; 267-277  DOI: 10.1007/s10522-008-9181-3

This is the likely itinerary for our 2009 Scottish tour.  It's still not written in stone, as we need to contact various people we want to meet up with en route.  I'm planning to update this blog as we go (Vodafone 3G access permitting!).

Day 1 - Tayport to Aberfeldy or Kenmore.  Hoping to stop off an visit an old friend near Dunkeld.

{mosmap kml='http://robertsaunders.org.uk/flies-and-bikes/cycling/maps/090315b.kml'}

Unusually for a bank holiday weekend, the sun's been shining.  I had committed myself to showing people round my Department's research laboratories, but it was such an excellent sunny morning I took the long way round, scoring 27 miles en route.  Fortunately I avoided coming to grief at the paws of a particularly dim lagomorph - happily, as I would have cut a sorry figure for the lab tour otherwise.

Once that was done and dusted, I rode home for a spot of lunch before nipping out for a tandem ride on the blue tandem (it was the other one I overhauled yesterday).  This was pretty uneventful, though we went down lanes new to my stoker.   Home and a bottle of Speckled Hen beckoned irresistibly.

My MP, Nadine Dorries, has been at the receiving end of accusations from the Daily Telegraph that she too has been on the expenses take (My MP gets "expenses" letter from the DailyTelegraph).  Now, I've got a bit of a soft spot for Nadine, despite her political belief being approximately the polar opposite of mine, that her parliamentary activities being pretty appalling.  I guess that's because she's always taken the time to respond to my letters and emails.  Well, except for the one pointing out that she really shouldn't be supporting homeopathic hospitals - particularly as the chucks around her past like as a nurse.  I also found her slightly juvenile blog articles quite appealing.  Valdemar Squelch, commenting on an article at Heresy Corner quite shrewdly observed:

Her whingeing, self-righteous style would be almost acceptable if she were 14, had just painted her bedroom black, and had been told by her parents that they're not going to buy her and her friend Clovinda tickets to a death metal concert.

Each year before taking the tandem away for our annual cycle tour, it always seems prudent to give it the once-over and to replace various parts.  So far (and for the tour starting in about a week), I have done the following:

• Fitted new front pannier racks - I've gone for the thoroughly excellent but rather hard to fit (at least to our tandem's braze-ons) Tubus steel racks.  Very elegant looking.
• Fitted new tyres.  Unfortunately I bought the wrong width (35mm instead of 32mm), so I had to take them off again!  We've switched to Schwalbe Marathon Plus, which seem to be the closest to virtually invulnerable tyres we've ever used.

I know that doesn't sound too much thus far, but today's schedule includes:

One campaigning point regarding the vile Phorm deep packet inspection system has been to suggest to major websites that they consider whether they should request that Phorm do not spy on their visitors. In recent months, some big players in the internet have done just that - Amazon and Wikipedia are two stand-out examples.

Since the BBC run one of the most visited sites in the internet, a number of people have written to enquire whether the BBC might do the same (and of course at a slightly more trivial level, the BT-Phorm system is branded BT-WebWise - very similar naming to the BBC's entirely different Webwise).

I had originally expected to be unable to ride this event, due to work commitments.  After several days of really quite bad weather, I was quite pleased to have been able to ride the event, as the wind dropped (and I am sure it was considerably more gentle that the forecast 14mph!), and the sun came out.

Judging from the readout on my HRM, the ride out to Stony Stratford was  quite an effective warmup, especially when keeping the speed up negotiating the roundabout over the A5!

HT: Grumpy Twin