Thursday 18 September: day twelve – Dunbarton to Glen Coe

79 miles. 7:09 hours of cycling. Average speed 11mph 

The day of the Scotland independence referendum. Two women overheard by Pete at the hotel reception: “How are you voting?” “Oh, I don’t know. I was a Yes until I heard Gordon Brown last night.” “If you vote No I’ll have to kill you.” 

We left at 8.30 and worked our way through Dunbarton morning traffic up to the edge of Loch Lomond. We tried to follow a cycle path which was both sign posted and in our Cicerone book but we ended up on a golf course. We went back to the busy main road and eventually picked up the West Lomond cycle path which closely followed the edge of the Loch, which was dark and forbidding.

We stopped for coffee and cake at a lakeside cafe and very quickly afterwards started the climb. It wasn’t steep but it was relentless – almost 20 miles of continuous ascent. Before starting the climb I had a puncture, my first. A thorn had gone through my front tyre. 

The most annoying bits of the climb were the long straight sections where you could hardly see the ascent but which felt like hard work. I kept thinking I had something stuck in my wheel that was holding me back and at one stage I actually did have, but mostly it was the mismatch between what it looked like and how steep it actually was. 

We stopped for lunch at the highly-recommended Real Food Cafe in Tyndrum and I ate a veggie burger and chips. The descent started much sooner after Tyndrum than the book suggested and we then crossed the Bridge of Orky, which is not a bridge at all, and climbed up on to Rannoch Moor.

What a weird place! Dark pools with black mounds of peat sticking out and smelling of sulphur. It was like something out of the approach to Mordor. The traffic was going past us on the single track road with no cycle path at unbelievable speeds and I developed the theory that everyone, not just cyclists, found the landscape forbidding and even frightening and so drove as fast as possible to get out of it.

The descent to Glen Coe was amazing – ten miles of fast cycling into huge overlapping mountains.

Pete had said to me – “Don’t miss the turning for the Youth Hostel which is a few miles before Glen Coe”, but I did. I went all the way down to the village and had to ask two SNP canvassers the way to the youth hostel. They told me and said: "I hope they don't ask your age". Cheek!

I had to climb back up about three miles. I was very tired and it felt really hard. It felt like I was right at the edge of what I was physically capable of.

When I got there Pete was checking in. 

We walked to the wonderful Clachaig Inn and I ate vegetarian haggis with neeps and tatties washed down by local beer and their own single malt. Brilliant!