"Nobody said it was easy"

Well, where do you start? Let's try Ardlui, on Loch Lomond. We started off in beautiful weather at about 9 am on a clear and cool morning. We were very keen to get away from the main road before the Bank Holiday traffic started pouring back into Glasgow, we cracked on quite happily for a couple of hours in sunshine but the road got busier and busier until it was pretty uncomfortable being constantly buffetted by cars and lorries. We turned off and took a back road into Glasgow and were then on home turf for a couple of hours (even popped into our local supermarket to pick up more water) before heading south through the lovely fishing villages of Halfway, Hamilton, Blantyre and Larkhall where the entire populations ran out of their homes to greet us and threw their hats into the air on our arrival; that was a dream. In fact all the aforementioned are pretty nondescript, characterless places and the residents didn't even know we were there (there was bunting out, but that was for an orange parade in about 6 weeks time). The next 60 miles or so were up and over several passes on terrible roads into a headwind and dodging lorries from the mine and the "under construction" wind farm (I'm sure they'll grow lots). I've struggled a bit today and in truth have held Stuart, whose as strong as an ox, back; we finally plodded into our final destination at about 7.30. The girls have done a fabulous job and managed to book a best western hotel + dinner for a song, after such a tough day it's a real treat to have such a fab place to stay, well done Sarah and Maria! Tomorrow can be a fabulous day (despite the weather forecast that would drown Noah) when we hope to cross the border into England, move over half way and end up in Garstang, Lancashire before dusk. Today we rode 114 miles in 8 hrs 40 minutes, 15 seconds; the name of our final destination? Lockerbie, which puts my trivial moans into some sort of perspective. It's a lovely wee place by the way.