Our last night away from home had arrived. The hotel receptionist in Dunoon welcomed us in, dripping wet though we were, and was happy for us to bring our bikes into the hotel lobby so they were out of the rain. We quickly organised a meal in the restaurant where we sat with a large group of tourists travelling by coach around Scotland. All that was left was to brace ourselves for the ride home the next day, one we knew would be a tough one.
As soon as we were ready after breakfast we set off along the coast beside Holy Loch. We had the roads almost to ourselves and it was cool and sunny although there were clearly rain clouds threatening in the distance. Our cycling distance for the day was forty seven kilometres but that meant nothing as we were well aware that despite both starting and finishing at sea level we had to cross some major hills on the way. The cycle route is a recognised signposted one which has five hundred and eighty seven metres of ascent (and one less on the descent, strangely) but the steepest part came after we reached the end of Loch Striven. Up to this point our electric motor assisted bikes were managing to cope with the gradients although we still had to pedal quite hard and our legs were beginning to complain despite all the riding we had been doing over the previous weeks. But beyond the loch the road turned a corner and aimed up hill, a small sign warning of a 12% gradient. Our bikes have different power levels but none of these gave our loaded bikes the power they needed so we dismounted and pushed, just like in the days before electric bikes were invented. Soon we were gasping for breath and our leg muscles were complaining loudly. Each corner revealed more of the road ahead which went up and up. The road seemed to get steeper and steeper until we saw another sign, this one pointing down the hill, revealing that the gradient we had just climbed was 20%. We both felt like collapsing but after a series of false summits we finally reached the top. Not that this meant all downhill from there onwards but we had overcome the steepest section of the route.
We stopped for coffee and cake at the Station Cafe, a former police station, then went at it again up another gradient. My strategy of not using brakes on the downhill sections put me some distance ahead and when Portavadie was in sight I wasted no time riding to the ferry terminal. I looked back up the road for Catriona but she was not in sight. Eventually my phone pinged and I read her message: "Chain has come off". This had happened before on a number of occasions as our bikes were getting dirtier each day. I knew she would fix it and was relieved to soon receive another message saying " OK coming now".
Both our bikes were in need of a service and we had almost no battery power left for the final hill up to our house after we had landed from the ferry at Tarbert. But we had done it! Home safe and back to a garden in which everything had gone wild in our absence. We had been away just three weeks during which we had ridden around six hundred and fifty kilometres through three European countries. The whole experience was terrific. We had met so many kind and lovely people we cannot possibly do them justice here and the joy each day of seeing something new as we rode past at our gentle cycling speed can barely be put into words. Roll on the next adventure.
It wasn't until after the third day at home that our bodies felt as if they had returned to normal; two long nights resting in bed, going to bed early and rising late. Our last day of riding hit us hard but there were other things going on in our heads too. There was the clock going back an hour from European time and then there was the increased daylight, a consequence of rapidly moving around four hundred and sixty miles (740 kilometres) northwards from Antwerp to Edinburgh, a place where at this time of year the nights are significantly shorter. Our minds and bodies were struggling to cope with all this. In the space of just two days we had transitioned from a heatwave in Belgium to a cool and wet climate on the west coast of Scotland and the days that followed showed us just how wet it can be here. In the past one could rely upon the month of June being one of the driest of the year but since we returned home something seems to have gone wrong. It serves as a reminder to us that we can no longer take our past weather patterns for granted.
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