back to Travels page

Monday 30th may saw Jason and Terry returned for their second bite of Scottish Rock,   but this was John's first experience of the hard stuff in this quantity. The ride felt like a toy compared to the climbing involved at Innerleithen and there's plenty of action all the way around this Seven Stanes Centre. Some of it is quite dangerous if you're panning your helmet cam around to take in the view while negotiating the devilish boulder piles. We stopped for a rest as we were armoured up with full face hats and the sun was really warming things up by now. John was visited by a little pal -   Here it is in a bit more detail just before it ate him 

We had wanted to return to Dalbeattie so that Jason could have another think about tackling that little stone they have here. He became the first of any of us to take on The Qualifier and cleaned it easily. It looked evil to me so I'd avoided it weeks previously, but now I just had to try after the young'un had done it, didn't I? And as you would expect, I went "a" over "t" at the first attempt, completely bungling the line. Yet another crushing blow to the battered right wrist. I blame my new Junior Ts, they are too tall and throw me off balance too easily (!). I'll swap them for some poxy Manitous (not). Anyway, I got it right the second time with a bit more braking and rearward lean. Here's Jason gearing up for the big descent,     and then having a slab of granite for lunch, not the chicken sarny he had on our first visit! 

  Here's what an ant sees when he looks up the Slab for idiot humanoids 

John declined the opportunity to try out The Slab, and that looked the right decision in view of what happened a couple of hours later!

A mile or two further on you get some more of this:    You can see the Sea from up here, but try to keep your eyes on the trail. Shortly after we followed (Golly's idea) what looked like a Black Route marker, because that's what we're at. All we got for our trouble was a nice walk-and-carry exercise and a stinging drag through gorse and prickles.  This doesn't look like a bike trail, does it?    And this isn't what you'd expect to find on a Christmas tree -   Is it a dream? - Windows 98 appearing on Golly's GPS while his compatriots abandon their bikes in the jungle?  

Eventually we dug ourselves out and somehow hit the red trail again.  We're now half way round the 18 mile course and the next optional obstacle is the Terrible Twins.   So called because they have a strong family likeness and are horrible. The Gollum had already done these last time, so now Jason wanted a go. Yet again, he made them look easy after a short recce. Gollum's turn again, and you hardly need telling that he made a spherical object of it at his first attempt - crikey, what an old knacker. Back to the top and this time he got away with it, but the wrist was well and truly screaming by now. Jason's fast landing cost him a double nipped inner tube and after he'd fixed those,   we found this thorn in the tyre from our off-route excursion earlier   

From the Twins onwards we found ourselves struggling for water, all three of us on empty, so the ride back was taken more easily than normal in the sweltering heat. It  was on one of these later downhill singletrack sections through the trees that John came unstuck. With Jason leading off and Terry in the middle, it was he who noticed no-one behind him about half way down. After Jason's accident yesterday we were all taking extra care of each other. So the Golly turned back up the trail to find John carrying the Saracen down it. The front tyre had come completely off the rim and there was still air in the tube! Of course, a puncture had caused it, most likely another thorn from the Christmas Tree excursion. A short while after starting the repair we heard Jason's voice from below so we yelled for him to stay there. We failed to fix the puncture so John carried the bike to the end of the section, where we found Jason repairing a stranger's puncture at the same time! The bloke seemed like an experienced cyclist but was on his own with no toolery. In this place? Anyway, a few more patches and a bit of new tube insertion later we were back on course, John uninjured after the deflation but a bit deflated. The rims on his Awol are dirty great, 35mm or more wide efforts, and you can pass the wheel through a tyre without it touching! Could be an early upgrade coming. Apart from that the bike took the same battering as the two Konas over the weekend - not really what it was created for, so it did well.

The fabulous Spooky Wood and tricky (but taken fast) Jacob's Ladder came and went without incident and with plenty of enjoyment, but we were very glad to get back to the van and take a long-needed drink. That's probably the most important thing you have to do on rides like this, especially when the temperature rises a few degrees. Only unusual circumstances caused us to run out, but really we should have carried more, although three litres seems heavy enough. We got through extra H₂0 this time because at Innerleithen and Glentress the day before we had all suffered dehydration headaches by not sipping regularly enough, so today we dragged on it. One of us should really have known better. Prat.

Next Dalbeattie Outing 25th Sept 2005