April 5th 2018 – Eight days after landing back in Scotland at the end of a second three-year stint living and working in the Middle East, we found ourselves standing on the platform of Glasgow Queen Street railway station waiting for the 9:10 am to Inverness. If the thought of taking early retirement from the world of IT was weighing on my mind before then, watching a thousand grey suites with emotionless faces push through the station turnstiles, on their way to a city centre desk that clearly didn’t fill them with joy, most certainly helped lift that weight.
The decision to cycle the North Coast 500 (NC500) and complete a John O’Groats to Land’s End (JOGLE) wasn’t all that well planned, apart from the purchase of the train ticket some three months prior from the princely sum of £8 each. If we had planned it then in all likelihood we would have talked ourselves out of it. While a climb of Mount Kilimanjaro was on the cards for a short while, the cycle eventually won through for a multitude of reasons… we would be using our bikes that had been gathering dust, it would allow us to reacquaint ourselves with the UK after too many years living away, we could go with the flow rather than the schedule of a guide, it would enable us to catch up with a few family and friends on route, plus it would be a hell of a lot cheaper!
By the time we had reached Land’s End, we had completed a little over 1600 miles in 28 days. There are days that we cycled 80+ miles and there were days that we cycled 15 miles, choosing instead to picnic and watch the world go by. While we followed the set NC500 route from Inverness Castle and back again, hugging the coastal road for its
In hindsight, I wish I had created a daily diary of the journey, but I didn’t, so the memory of our amazing four weeks on the road are told a ridiculously large number of photographs. The 400Gb of the video I also ended up with by the end of the ride will need to wait until another decade before even being considered for editing.
