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| Loch Alvie, near Aviemore |
66 trouble free miles and no real rain! We followed the B9152 straight down the valley to Aviemore, rather than using the NCN suggestion on the other side of the valley which is longer and seemed likely to be hillier, since we aimed to get somewhere on the other side of Inverness today, and we hadn't encountered much traffic on this road so far. The ride to Aviemore was flat, pretty, and easy. In Aviemore we detoured to a bike shop to get replacement brake pads. We stopped for a snack sitting in bright sun next to the old 17th century bridge in Carrbridge. There were a few sprinkles of rain on the easy climb to 1325 feet over Stochd, and then it was downhill most of the way to Inverness. We visited the Clava Chambered Cairns, thought to date from late Neolithic or early Bronze age, prettily and peacefully located in woods 4 miles from Inverness. We skipped the next part of the NCN route to Inverness, which seemed long and wiggly through the village of Culloden, and instead sailed straight down the B9006, which was fine.
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| Clava Chambered Cairns |
In Inverness we had lunch at Girvans, and went to the Tourist Information Center to look for likely places to stay within the next 15 miles, and to find the location of some bike shops. There were three on our route out of the city. Our tandem has small, 20 inch, wheels, and we need high pressure tires for the extra weight, so replacement tires are hard to find. Amazingly, the second one turned out to have exactly the tire that we use (Schwalbe Marathon with Kevlar reinforcement to help prevent flats), and so we purchased a pair to eliminate, we hoped, the problems we were having with flat tires. For the next three days we were carrying two tires as well as the luggage panniers on the back of the bike - we kept the old ones for a couple of days cycling through the remote northern moors until we knew there were no problems with the new ones - and must have looked rather strange.
We followed NCN Route 1 out of Inverness and over the Morray Firth. For the next part, on the Black Isle, NCN and CTC have a variety of suggested routes. We basically followed the NCN "winter" route to Munlochy and then up a steady climb of 600 feet to near Culbokie. Here the NCN route does a 9 mile loop through Dingwall to avoid using the A9 bridge over the Cromarty Firth. We decided to brave two miles of the A9 to save time. On most, but for some reason not all, of the bridge there was a sidewalk we could use so we weren't in the way of the traffic on the rather narrow road. After that the road became wider, and it was just another mile before a tiny lane led us up the hill back to the NCN route.
We stopped for the night at the Novar Arms in Evanton. Before dinner we put our shiny new tires on the bike - not well timed, with rain starting before we had finished. That seemed to fix the problems - after that we had no flat tires in 300 miles.
Route and more pictures
Elevation
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