For those familiar with our trips you will be unsurprised to hear the story of our so called 'planning' for this trip. Initially billed as a one week biking trip somewhere we were haggled up to two weeks by Steve's infectious enthusiasm. With the length of time agreed we moved onto location, ideally looking for somewhere exciting but not too distant - Turkey and Norway became quick front runners. With guide books and maps purchased we arrange a rendezvous at my house for a BBQ and some detailed comparison of our options. The first wobble of the wheels were soon apparent when Nadine reminded Steve that they had already booked a holiday leaving the weekend we were planning on getting back. When Duncan called to say that he could only realistically make one week we were all scrambling for the all too familiar planning contingency rip cord. Assigning guide books and maps to the growing pile of 'almost' destination material we pondered what we could achieve.
From this rather gloomy state of mind came a casual suggestion from Duncan that we should look at the classic Lands end to John O'Groats trip. As Duncan put it 'we've all thought about it in the past' and it seems Hugh had given it rather more thought than most when he sent round a proposed route he had already sketched out. With the idea resonating in the group Steve had the misfortune to look up his spare number of days off left for the year and came up with the highly inadequate 3 days. Still we were all jumping on the band wagon like it was the only ride in town so even this proved to only be a bump in the road rather than a stop sign - Steve agreed that he could join us for the Scotland leg of the journey. Mind you looking at the proposed mileage we were unsure we'd make it that far.
With the destination sorted the rush to start booking everything began. A few iterations of the route eased out the start of the trip and loaded more miles towards the end when we hoped to be conditioned and then it was time to move from email and thinking about it and onto phones and booking. Top marks to Hugh for his tele-sales like dedication to the job. The only fly in the ointment was that the sleeper train home already had six bikes booked on board and being rail travel it is a physical impossibility to exceed this number otherwise the French built diesel engine simply goes on strike. Still a quick phone call to Wick post office revealed that it was a simple matter to post the bikes, see day eleven for how this panned out in reality...