April 1, 2014
An Introduction
(Note: I started creating this journal seven years go, back when we still had a home. Somehow I never got around to publishing it, and was reminded of it when thinking of our climb up Striding Edge by our hike in Arches National Park. Better late than never. I’ll start posting it day at a time as I find the time for it.)
Doing some housecleaning, I uncovered a shoebox full of journals from some previous cycling tours. It's been misplaced for quite some time, and the journals themselves have been unread for much longer. This seems like as good a place as any to store them so I can find them myself again, and maybe others will get something from them as well. So, this is the first of a series of transcriptions of these old journals, pretty much word for word as they were written at the time, other than the introduction. I'll use the introduction page to frame the journal a bit and give it some context.
This journey was a month long loop that began and ended in Edinburgh, aided by a few connecting stretches by train so that we could cover more territory. It is the only tour we've made to the British Isles, and we've talked ever since about wanting to return. It was a preplanned/credit card itinerary, meaning that we stayed in inns each night, most of which I'd booked in advance before we left Portland. This was before our Bike Friday years, and we were both riding Cannondale touring bikes and a fairly light load. It was also back in the days when we would just show up at the airport with our bikes, trusting that we could find boxes for them at the counter. And, it was also before we had electronic readers or a GPS, so we carried along a small library of literature and maps - probably a third of our luggage weight in those days was paper.
That's about it. Here's what we looked like back then:
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| Comment on this entry | Comment | 5 |
Will be very interesting to read along with you on this Journal. Could be a real nostalgia trip for us. We were living in Aberdeen when you did this trip and spent every weekend tramping around Scotland with our kids. I guess we’ll find out if you made it up there as you post the days. From your pictures of the Cullins you won the weather lottery, at least on that day!
The year before you did this trip, we did our first tour with our kids, . The C2C route from Whitby on the Irish Sea (west coast) to Robin Hood’s Bay (east coast) on the North Sea. Kirsten has some notes on that trip and we do have all the pic’s (first generation of digital!) so your journal might spur us into action to post about that (short tour). Still have lots of fond, and wet, memories of it.
Rgds,
Kirsten & Lyle
3 years ago
It sounds wonderful to have gotten to experience an extended stay in Scotland, getting to take excursions when the weather is fair and sitting out the worst of it. As you can imagine, we saw our share of both ends on this tour.
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