Day 5

Well it is now that last day. We set of from Avimore at 7:25am in the bright but slightly cooler morning. We are all rearing to go as today should be the shortest days riding. Everyone is in good sprits as we all had a giggle at Dave’s expense as we learnt that his bum was shaved so that plasters could be put over his blisters, ouch. Breakfast was at 9:15am 4 miles short of Inverness on the A9. It was a bit misty and the temperature had dropped to 11’c. It was the usual breakfast food but this time we were all wrapped up in blankets to keep warm! Because of the drop in temperature we all put on more layers only to find that the weather would change again so we took the layers off. Snack stop at 11:50am, 5 miles before Tain. Lucy and Serena had brought us some different cake, it was so nice to taste something different. After Serena shared what she found in Dave’s pants, Harry decided to play with his banana before eating it. We were just getting happier, knowing that at every stop we were closer to the end. 14:30pm just past Borora we had a quick stop for a snack and a drink. It had warmed up to 16’c and the sun had come out too. Harry had a new pain, his Achilles heel was hurting. We had a quick stop at the top of one of the hills for Rob to adjust my indexing and Harry carried on up the hill. What we wasn’t expecting was for Harry to be hiding up a tree just round the corner which was very amusing for us but not so amusing for Serena as she thought he had been knocked off somewhere. 17:05pm late lunch at another well known stop. Dave and Harry call it ‘the little house on the prairie’, basically it’s a tearoom on top of a hill with two lovely old ladies running it who serve broth and soup. We timed it very well, we had been there a minute before a whole coach load of people turned up. There was a shortage of seats and this old man with crutches joined our table as it was near the door. I was very tempted to seal his crutches! The weather has changed again. It was now very misty and cold at 12’c. Everyone put their layers back on. As it was very, very misty the girls lay by hopped just in case we needed them. I have never known the weather to change so rapidly. The temperature dropped some more, now down to 9.5’c. Mean while my brother had met up with Margaret and Alan awaiting our finish at John O’Groats and had called Lucy because our hotel stopped cooking food at 9pm but if we ordered they would cook it and then the bar staff would re-heat it for us. So in the last 5 miles of our ride we had Lucy taking our food order’s for dinner. We finally got to the end at 19:45pm to find Lucy, Serena, Margaret, Alan, Sean and Sarah waiting for us cheering us to the end. We were soaked so we got wrapped up and sat in the warmth drinking our rego back to our hotel with our faces beaming knowing we had done it. The bar staff were great with sorting our meals out, they had set up our own table in the bar area and has also kept quite a surprise my mum had done. She had given us a couple of bottles of champagne so we could celebrate.