Thursday    15.6.2017
  357km Total: 2340km    1.64km Total: 139.92km

I spent most of yesterday night planning routes and accommodation along the NC500, the coastal route along the north-western part of Scotland.
It's pretty obvious that Scotland is a wildly popular tourist destination since it took a lot more calculating and planning to find reasonably priced and strategically placed hotels than I'm used to.

Inverness is the actual starting point for the route but accommodation there was just crazy expensive considering I'd barely have time to see anything of it before moving on.
Instead I opted for Conon Bridge and The Whitehouse, Bikers B&B for about a third of the price of a room in "the big city".

Along the way I'd planned a few scenic routes, the first of which was Glen Quaich Road.
A fantastic little single track road which anywhere else in the world would have been gravel.
Here the surface was better than many of the motorways back home.
Great riding, very little traffic and stunning scenery.

After a stretch that was pure transport which wasn't bad at all either I get to Cairnwell Pass, a "mountain pass" at a mindboggling 670m asl.
Again everything is relative so considering that I went over passes last year above 2000m asl this isn't very high but it's still the highest main road in all of Britain.
What it didn't really deliver when it came to the riding it more than made up for with the scenery, the endless greens hills afar made the Scottish immersion complete.
This was exactly as I imagined Scotland to be apart from the fact that my imagination can't create something as beautiful as this.

Cairnwell was the literal highpoint of the day but the figurative highpoint was what followed next, the A939.
The superlatives just doesn't cover how great of a ride this was, it was almost a spiritual experience.
Grand nature where the highlands are at their most beautiful and long sweeping roads the went up hills and down valleys for almost 100kms.
I must admit that it happens pretty frequently that I look down on the trip counter just to see how far I have left to go but here I pretty much did it every five minutes just to make sure that I wasn't there yet.

But eventually this gods gift to bikers give way to a highway for the last stretch to The Whitehouse.
This place didn't have a restaurant so I walk down to the hotel (there only was the one) for supper before I head back to Whitehouse to plan the last stretch on the NC500.
As it stands right now I'm stuck somewhere around the Isle of Skye without anywhere to stay within a reasonable distance.

Glen Quaich Road

Cairnwell Pass
A weird detail is that on the first picture it rained so hard I had to use the waterproof camera while as you can see the asphalt is all dry on the next image and they're just taken about fifteen minutes and 3kms apart.

A939

Friday    16.6.2017
  266km Total: 2606km    3.88km Total: 143.8km

Today I'm heading out on the North Coast 500, a stretch of road along the northwest part of Scotland marketed as the Scottish answer to Route 66.
But first I'm getting well fed on a full Scottish breakfast which is included in the booking and along with great service, nice rooms and a welcoming host makes me think this will probably be one of the best accommodations of the whole trip.
The breakfast consists of beans, mushrooms, eggs, bacon, sausage, black pudding and tomato.
I'm not much for mushrooms and the black pudding was a bit rich in flavour (I was burping black pudding all day) for me but definitely a notorious breakfast that gives you hair under your kilt.

The road lives up to its expectations immediately and is a great ride which is nice because even though it's not raining (yet) the sky is just a solid white and the visibility is somewhat limited.
After about 100kms I get to the first detour, Dunrobin Castle.
Right after I've bought my entry ticket the clerk tells me the falconer is about to do a show and if I want to see it I should head down there straight away.
Of course I will!
I rush down and sit down with a few busloads of pensioners and get a real show, the falconer (who was also the castle forester) was a real entertainer.
It was both educational and entertaining and with the amazing surroundings it was in its own worth the £11 entry fee.

The castle was as impressive as you might expect it to be with a building from the middle ages.
But it is a bit hard to take in that this was residence to someone that wasn't even royalty.

After the tour of the castle I continue towards the north coast and the northernmost tip, John o' Groats.
It is the northernmost part of the British mainland, pretty much Great Britain's Nordkap.
John o' Groats is a concept as much as a location since it along with the southern equivalent Lands End in Cornwall is what in Swedish terms would be from Ystad to Haparanda, across the nation.
It was a bit underwhelming for me personally but the weather was good and there was a nice view of the Orkney islands.

The next stop is practically just around the corner, just 10kms west along the coast and is Castle Mey, a castle bought by the queen mother for only a hundred pounds because it was in ruin and renovated from floor to ceiling to function as a summer resort for the royal family.
The queen has donated the castle to a foundation but apparently Prince Charles still uses it as a "cottage" a couple of weeks every summer.
A memorable part of the tour was that when the mantelpiece in solid bronze with the queens insignia was to be installed it was so heavy it went through the second floor and landed in the kitchen.

Right at the end of the tour it has started to rain.
Luckily there's only about 70kms to go to the hotel because the rest of the days ride was very uninspiring, if the visibility was limited before I'm now in a complete whiteout.
I could just as well have been riding along the edge of space as the coast of Scotland.

I'm not completely drenched when I get to the hotel but the combination of cold and rain makes the visor fog up even with the pin-lock so the last stretch was a bit more exiting than it had to be.
I get a warm shower and sit down in the hotel pub to eat a beer battered haddock.
As dessert I had a pint of Guinness which I'm enjoying as I'm writing these sentences.
I spend the rest of the evening doing route calculations as the lack of accommodation overcomplicates things.

NC500 somewhere along Cromarthy Firth

Dunrobin castle (no photography allowed inside).

Falconer show


John o' Groats

Castle Mey (no photography allowed inside)

A cat among the canines at Betty Hill hotel

Saturday    17.6.2017
  251km Total: 2857km    3.34km Total: 147.14km

It'll be a little breezy on the bike 'tis morn and older gentleman said to me in the breakfast restaurant who had ridden a Triumph in his youth in the 40:s.
He wasn't kidding, when I woke up there was a constant howling noise which I traced to the window which was a closed as it would ever be.
According to weather online the winds where 60-70kph along the north coast so manoeuvring the bike was a bit of a wrestling match but at least the rain was at a minimum.

The road to the first scenic route of the day B873 was almost as fun as the actual route, a real nice ride along the Naver lake on single track.
I don't expect to be the only vehicle on the road but when it's clearly signed single track, not suitable for caravans and every other vehicle is a medium to huge camper van it makes you wonder was goes on in peoples heads.
Yes, I do know there's a difference between a caravan and a camper van but with that logic there could have been lorries as well but they seem to have the good sense to stay clear.

A836 to Tounge and back in the NC500-route wasn't much worse and pretty much the whole day was a scenic route really.
Up in the north-western part almost every road was single track with so many curves and bends it's almost a caricature of how a road is supposed to be.
A tricky thing is that going over a hilltop where you see the road in the distance your mind draws a picture of how the road should look on the other side based on what you're seeing.
That picture is always completely wrong.

This combined with the possibly of car or a camper van appearing in the middle of the road on the other side of every hilltop means it never gets dull.
Apart from the weather that is.
It just gets more and more bleak as the day goes on, as soon as the wind starts to die down the rain picks up.

I get lunch at Kylesku Hotel and take my time, the riding has been so good I'm way ahead of schedule and if I continue like this I'll be in Ullapool well before check-in at the hotel.
On the last stretch the rain just gets worse and worse and arriving in Ullapool it's just hammering down.

I hang back on the room for awhile to get my temperature back up before I go on a little sightseeing in the village ending at the local pub to get supper.
To my great surprise there actually was a gluten free burger on the menu so I order myself one.
It might have been the beer I had while waiting that made me think it was absolutely hilarious when I get a burger without buns.
It felt just on par with the Scottish no nonsense attitude and you just can't argue with that kind of logic, the air is as gluten free as it gets.
That a bagpipe-version of Journeys Don't stop believing was playing in the speakers just added to the comedy.

Somewhere on the B871 along the Naver

Along B873 by Loch Loyal

Castle Varrich
I could argue that I didn't want to leave the bike unattended for as long as that trek would take me but to be honest I was just to lazy to do it.

Somewhere along the north-western coast