Robots are cool

Stuart and I headed up to the north-west for couple of days biking at the weekend. We made good time to Ullapool on Friday night but then arsed around so much looking for somewhere to sleep that it was 2am before we parked the van on a little pier near Achiltibuie and drank some of Stuart’s very nice, posh whisky. There were some spooky noises coming from below the pier when we were bivvi-ing, which I swear weren’t because of the whisky. As expected, it was a brilliant place to wake up and we were hyped.

We’ve had a route up that way on the hit-list for more than a year and were super excited. It comes recommended on a website as well as a bunch of forums and we also had a personal recommendation. So it was a real pity that it was totally shite. The views were moderate and the trails were dull. And, no, I don’t mind hiking with my bike. Admittedly, I’m a self-confessed mountain bike snob, but I couldn’t really recommend it. Perhaps worth doing if you’re in the area and can’t get to Torridon, but definitely not worth the drive. Still, it was another day in the hills, which is never a bad thing.

In case anyone’s interested (but more importantly, because I’ve got a cool new toy!), here are some files from the route. This sort of stuff would be much cooler if Scotland had decent aerial photos:

• Tracklogs (GPX)
• Google earth/maps (KMZ)
• SVG once GPS Visualizer stops throwing 500 errors

I’ve left the section where we missed a turn in there – it’s tricky to spot (or at least it was for us) and it might help someone.

On the way out we found a large shed/barn which was clean, sheltered from the ever worsening weather and accomodated us, the van and two cheery, chirping birds with acres to spare. After a wash in the river, we managed a quarter of the monster tin of 100 hot-dogs (thank you Phil sandwich!) and a plate of pasta before crashing out. Stuart liked his bivock (bivvi-hammock thing).

On Sunday we headed down to Achnashellach for a route that I had spotted on the map on my last trip up there – Gleann Fhiodhaig, west to east. It’s a nicer route than Arkle – a little climb, then ever so slightly downhill singletrack with just a little too much lumpy grass to have to contend with to be really good. Not as good as some of the other rides up there, but probably still worthwhile and with some fun, muddy singletrack to get you back to the road. No GPS data for that one, I’m afraid – managed to run out of phone battery half-way round.

I felt like I hadn’t been up north for ages and it was a great weekend. I need to see about getting a couple of long weeknds away before the summer is out – this recent rain has got me all keen to squeeze what I can out of the rest of the summer.