This day, as most before it, was a pain in the ASS.
Got up, rode from end point day before (Drigg), approx 8 miles away, to the bottom of scafell pike Click for map
A work chum of mine, Chris Akers, was kind enough to join us up the mountain. Us being Walker, Norton, Akers and my good self.
Climbing Scafell had no high points really, all we were thinking about was the ride out of the lake district..... so we climbed the mountain.
Once again, we were greeted at the top by a total white out:
To ensure we did not have to ride the bikes back on ourselves for miles around the mountain range, we came down the other side of the Sca fell, via the Corridor Pass. I say we, me and Walker. Chris and Phil went back to car park via the route we came. This meant some map and compass navigation with about 5 metres of visibility. Note the navigation panic:
Corridor Pass looked pretty epic... all photos we took did not reflect this in any way, which was quite annoying.
After a fairly long descent we got to Seathwaite to find this was not where we expected to start the ride from but it was where Dad and Phil expected us to be, so all good. Confusion for a few minutes where Andy had to pretend to be a lost child on the phone to the operator in order to be put through to Sonnys dad to find out where they were. We had no money or phone signal, rookie mistake. Thankfully, they turned up as we were on the phone.
Had a brief moment thinking we had to do Honister Pass, which having tackled some 25% hills a few days before would have been possible, but not desirable. Fortunatley this was not the case.
We set off for Keswick, 100% convinced that the road therewould be UBER hilly, and had the fear. For some reason though, this was not the case and the ride out was very enjoyable.
We now had a fairly hilly, but not terrible set of miles to get through to Kirkpatrick Flemming.
On the way there we were on a B road that followed the Motorway, and seemed to be popular with cyclists, and people wanting to drive really fast, although the road was not busy. We came to a junction on the road, only to find a "Road Closed" barrier up, and two people from the higway agency in a car there. We approached them and asked if we could still use the road. They advised us that there had been an incident with a bike and a car and that the Police were investigating, but if we proceeded slowly the Police would let us through, so we set off. After a mile or so we got to the accident, the Police were measuring tyre marks etc. There was a car with one bike underneath it, one wrapped around the wheel arch and around 3 or 4 more scattered around, all the bikes were very badly smashed and broken. Needless to say this brought our mood down considerably.
However we rode on, and eventually entered Scotland, which made us very happy. Two countries down, one to go ;-)
We stayed at a campsite at Lochmaben. We all decided to get some food in the nearest town; Lockerbie. MISTAKE. All place to eat were SHUT, walked into a Chinese that's door was open "we shut now" (literally that is what she said). So we went to a chippy. Looked OK. Whilst we were getting served two kids, about 10 or 11 walked in and started pumping money into the gambler, the owners did not bat an eyelid.
On the walk back to the van we heard numerous drunken shouts,and I was pretty much 100% sure a knife related incident was going to occur involving one of us, and an over keen local, at ANY SECOND. Awesome place.
We all went to bed wondering what other delights Scotland had in store for us.
Sonny
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