Day 33, 19th June 2011, Tain to Foyer
I have decided that I am not going to eat the Full Scottish Breakfast anymore, a meal that has some similarity to the Full English Breakfast. We were told by one of our hosts that the Full English Breakfast is rubbish. The ingredients, bacon, eggs, sausage, tomato, black pudding and mushrooms are the same, but where the English fry the tomato, the Scots grill them. There are some other variations, for example, some Scottish breakfasts include a tattie scone, that is, a wedge of a potato pancake. These are so strikingly similar from one establishment to another that I suspect they come from Tesco, a theory I intend to check. Haggis is occasionally offered.
Anyway, I travel better on cereal or porridge and toast.
Today was an easy day compared with the last couple. For most of the day the road was flat, and we travelled on Cycle Route 1, the North Sea route that we joined shortly before we arrived in Tain yesterday. This route has a total length of 6000km, and we have now ridden on it in Holland, Germany, Denmark, Norway and England in addition, now, to Scotland.
We are getting used to the weather. Today was pretty good, with just a few drops of rain and broken cloud. The temperature got to about 16C, which is a bit above what we have been experiencing, and there was no wind, which is such a pleasant change. It felt like a nice day.
We started back in attractive country, pretty farmland, with shallow forested valleys and rhododendrons. The towns are so much more attractive than the ones we have ridden through elsewhere in Scotland. So we meandered along comfortably and covered 108 km.
Finding accommodation was difficult. There are a couple of little towns along this southern, les-travelled shore of Loch Ness, but we found nothing that could offer us an evening meal, so we rode on to the locality, rather than a town, of Foyer, which seems to be here because of a hydroelectric plant. We found signage for 2 hotels. The first was up a very steep and long winding path, but was closed today. After a considerable amount of effort, which included using a map given to us by a passerby and a ride up another steep and winding path we found the hotel. We missed it at first as the sign had just been cleaned, and the arrow on it was placed pointing the wrong direction.
This hotel is another of those rare finds. It costs 80 pounds, but the huge room has windows with unimpeded views of the loch and an enormous four-poster bed. It is great, and another of those bits of happenstance that we so love on these trips.
We saw some sheep with four horns. That is, four horns each.
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