Day 16 - Monday 13th August - Edinburgh to Crieff

Weather - Drizzly and wet for most of the day

Distance - 47.5 miles

Camp Site - Crieff Cricket & Rugby Club, Mardon, Brioch Terrace, Crieff

Leaving the site around the usual 8.30 am we passed through residential areas on the edge of Edinburgh through the busy rush hour traffic until our route joined a cycle path alongside the A90 before turning into Queensferry. This is now a quiet little village with a cobbled main street and quite different from the busy place it must have been when it was actually the southern ferry port for the ferry across the Firth of Forth. The cobbles were wet and did not make for comfortable cycling although they probably discouraged too much vehicular traffic from the town centre.

It was very cold and damp here but I took a photograph of the railway bridge before riding on towards the cycle path over the road bridge. As I rode up the approach onto the bridge it started a drizzly rain but a group of us stopped to take photographs as it is such a landmark on our journey. I had crossed the Forth Road Bridge on previous occasions never dreaming that one day I would cycle across it having cycled all the way from the most south westerly point of England. I think that the thought of what we had achieved crossed the minds of everyone as we photographed each other at this significant point on the trip.

Then we moved on towards Rosyth and the Naval Dockyard but a little further on near a place called Saline I was suddenly unable to change the gears on the front mech. After some initial panic, a bit of fiddling about with it and considerable assistance from others in the group we managed to free it. I think that it was a combination of dirt from the road and damp from the continual rain that had caused it to seize up but I was eventually able to carry on. When we got to the camp site later in the day I asked Nic to have a look at it and he lubricated and cleaned it for me. It occasionally gave trouble later in the trip and I was able to free it but I gave it a thorough clean when I arrived home. On the whole the bike stood up very well to the high mileage and bad weather. It was out in the worst of the weather not only during the day but also overnight as it was very rarely possible to keep the bikes undercover at all.

At about 26 miles at Pool O' Muckhart we stopped at a pub for a coffee to warm us up as it was still very cold and wet. It was about 11.30 am but the pub appeared to be open. There were about half a dozen of us and we ordered coffee and asked if there was anything to eat. The barmaid said that there was not as the pub did not serve food until 12.00 noon. Eventually we asked if she had any crisps and she said "Oh yes!" Then someone asked if she had any biscuits and she again said "Oh yes - we have shortbread". So we had coffee, crisps and shortbread biscuits all round in spite of the barmaid being very reluctant to think of anything that she could serve to us!

The official route then took us through Auchterarder and on to the B8062 but we decided that as the main road the A823 was not very busy we would take the direct route past the Gleneagles Hotel and Golf Course and avoid the "circuitous loop" as the weather had been so wet. As we went along it dried up and in Muthill we found a very nice little café where we had the "day' s special" - soup, fish and chips, bread and butter and coffee. Then on the short distance to Crieff arriving at about 2.30 p.m. where we found the camp site on the left hand side on the way in to Crieff. This was again on a sports ground and next to a caravan park and we were able to use the clubhouse showers and toilets. As the showers for "home" and "away" teams were next to each other with no division for modesty the ladies were able to use the facilities on the caravan park next door.

As it was still fairly early in the day a group of us walked up the steep hill into the centre of Crieff where it started to rain again so we went into a small café for a cream tea with scones. Unfortunately the cream was UHT cream from a pressurised container - oh for some Devon or Cornish clotted cream!