my, that title certainly rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?  anyway, our first day of biking, Sunday, July 12th – we biked to Doune Castle, a 10 mile, fairly easy ride, and spent a lot of time inside the castle.  it rained a bit when we were inside, but then the rain stopped and we tromped all around the grounds, which were quite lovely.  this is the back wall viewed from the back; the owner of the castle (a duke?  i can’t remember who it was) had lofty plans to build more rooms on the castle but never managed to accomplish that.

kevin took lots of photos outside.

it’s funny how much this photo looks like a picture kevin took when we were in LA together, hiking on the trail behind will rogers’ house.

i think this picture of kevin is funny, and i love it.  since i had the video camera and he had the camera, most of the pictures are of me, but clearly kevin would have enjoyed posing for many pictures!

we spent at least an hour walking around the grounds, and it got warmer and we took off our biking pants, down to our bike shorts and no jackets.

we headed off away from the castle, with just our one map page, as you may recall.  we also had the detailed written directions.  they read like this “return to the A84 and continue left back down the hill and over the bridge…”

we weren’t going back the way we’d come, but were going to go on a different little road.  we didn’t have the little section of map that showed the very short distance from the castle to the town of Doune.  We stopped and studied the statement and reasoned that if we went BACK across the bridge, we’d go right, not left.  but it said to go left.  hmm, what to do?

we went right instead of left.

we assumed we were going the correct way…but then we were biking along this road, the A84, and there were cars, and then more cars, and a whole lot of cars, all going really fast.  it was like a highway with no shoulder to ride on.  oh dear.

finally we arrived at some little town and realized that we were going on the big A84 (we knew were on the A84), but that we were north of the little road we’d taken on our trip to the castle, and the road we  wanted to be on was south of it.

uh oh.  we didn’t want to go back the way we’d come because we didn’t want to be on that dangerous-seeming road one more minute.  looking at the map, we did see a little road up ahead that went north a little, and it looked like there was some kind of little road that paralleled the big road.  a frontage road, maybe?  at that point all we knew is we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing.

we climbed a short gravelly road and got to the top.  there was no road leading in the direction of Callendar, where we wanted to be, but instead, a grass path.  kevin said it might have been an old train path.  but there were no tracks, just  grass.

this is what it looked like.

because we didn’t know what lie ahead of us, and because we weren’t on mountain bikes, we walked our bikes.

we walked and walked and kept hoping to see a road.  finally it looked like there was an inn, maybe, up ahead, which would mean there must be a road, plus we could see people standing in front of it.  yeah!

we came to a tall fence with a gate.  on the other side wasn’t an inn, but a house.  two women were talking in front of it, and a little girl came running up to us, very very excited.  at this point kevin was lifting our bikes, one by one, over the gate.

the one woman was saying good-bye to the other woman as the little girl ran around and asked us where we were going and who we were and she clearly didn’t see a lot of people out here in the middle of nowhere.  we waited for the women to say their good-byes, and finally asked for directions about getting back to Callander.

the woman said we were going in the right direction, and if we followed the path a little more we’d come to a road, and we’d get back just fine, and Chloe (the little girl) did the trip all the time.  Chloe, who was about eight, maybe, got even more excited and wanted to go with us.  of course the woman wouldn’t let her.

we thanked her a lot and continued down the path.  chloe was sad to see us go and after a while we really wished that the woman (her grandmother, maybe?) wasn’t more crazily permissive.

after sloshing through some muddy bits of path, we finally came to the road.  once again, kevin had to lift the bikes over a gate in the fence.

it wasn’t a good road to bike on, but full of gravel and big rocks and it went up quite a bit.  soon we were in a forest.

it was pretty, and we did bike, but we could see big black clouds headed our way.  there was no sign of life anywhere and we kept wondering if the woman really let the little girl ride her bike by herself.  maybe she went with friends, or a parent.

at some point i gave up riding and walked my bike.  this is the first of quite a few photos of me pushing my bike during our days of biking.

kevin had put two rear-view mirrors on both of our bikes, and at some point i realized i only had one.  i’d lost one somewhere, and kevin decided to ride back to see if he could find it.

so there i was, in the middle of the forest somewhere in scotland, all alone, hoping that kevin would return.

he did, but without the rearview mirror.  it didn’t matter at all, i was just so happy to see him again.

we finally came out of the woods and biked along a road.  the thing is, we kept coming to interections and really didn’t know which way to go.  which way did Chloe go?  how on earth did that little girl get all the way to Callendar on that little one-speed bike?  and why hadn’t we thought to try to buy off that woman to get her to let Chloe show us the way?

it was really pretty, that remote road.  part of the forest had been cut down by loggers, but it looked mostly like people didn’t use any of these road.  there were lots and lots of ferns growing by the side of the road here, and throughout our trip.

by some miracle the rain clouds pased us, and we finally reached yet another gate, this the tallest one yet.  kevin hoisted our bikes over again, and the road on the other side was paved, if full of holes, plus it was going downhill.  across the way, a man was tending his garden and we stopped and asked him if we were headed in the right direction.

he said we just had to follow the road and we’d get back to town.

awesome.  but how had Chloe managed those big gates?  she must have taken a better route.

it didn’t matter; the sun was shining, we were going downhill, and we were on our way back to civilization.

i stopped to video our descent.

when we were close to town, a bike path appeared and we followed it into Callandar.

one funny thing is that in booking our trip in July, i was afraid we’d run into lots and lots of other bikers.  i’d read that this was one of the busiest tourist times of year, so i figured we’d see many other people along these bike routes.

of course we didn’t see anybody on our own private road somewhere north of the A84, but we rarely saw other bikers our entire trip.

since it was much more hilly and challenging than we imagined it’d be, the occasional riders we did see looked like serious cyclers, fit and fast and riding lightweight racing bikes.

but at the end of that first day, we were just so happy to have made it back to our B&B.  when we biked along the Danube in Austria, it was difficult to get lost because we biked right along the Danube, a big body of water that would be hard to lose.  one day during that trip we couldn’t figure out where to cross to the other side and we had a disagreement about which path to take to get back to the river after spending the night in a town just off of it, but it was never a big issue…there was the river, a major part of the Austrian landscape.

our first day of Scotland biking taught us that we must always take all the maps for the day.  we never got lost again, but that first day was probably the easiest in terms of hill difficulty.  but then again, there was that steep forest and the panicky feeling of not knowing where we were…

the rain came later.

that night we ate dinner at our B&B; i had the sunday pot roast and kevin had fish-n-chips, his main diet during our trip.  the food wasn’t bad, and in the little bar we ordered a sample of three kinds of whiskey, including Macallan single malt, two different vintages of it.  we just looked for the macallan at a local liquor store and they did have the kind we’d tried, but it was extremely expensive.  we wished we’d bought a bottle when we were in Scotland, but we did manage to buy plent of whiskey, plus many more weighty things.

monday, our second day of biking, we were going to head to our first Loch.

ok then,

grace