Cycling day 38: Balnakyle to Nairn

The mileage was fairly low again today. That’s lucky because my brake pads have been wearing very thin, so needed replacing. I didn’t manage to find the bike shops in Inverness, but did find one in Nairn, today’s destination. So, now I can brake more confidently again, rather than having to plan for hills to perform my braking for me.

In Inverness I revisited the railway station. I looked there on my way north aware that there should be a Sustrans milepost somewhere there, but I couldn’t find it. The motorcyclists I met several days ago at the Crask Inn said that they’d seen it near the cycle parking at the station. So, I looked a bit harder this time. The difficult bit was finding the cycle parking (which turned out to be on platform 6/7). After that the milepost was easy. This one’s a Mills type and is little unusual in that it doesn’t have destinations written on either of the branches of the tree (The artwork is called the Fossil Tree). I guess the destinations could be a bit confusing given that the milepost isn’t at all aligned with the cycle route itself, which is in fact a few hundred metres away.

On the way out of Inverness eastwards both NCR1 and NCR7 followed the same path. This was retracing my route from when I’d passed through several days ago. NCR1 diverges from NCR7 near the Clava Cairns, and you’re rewarded with a view of a viaduct pretty much straight away before the route climbs into the hills. The route is very quiet here and soon runs along roads through various forests before descending down to Nairn. In Nairn it joins the riverside and I left the route soon after to go and find my accomodation and the bike shop “Bike Bug”.

Tomorrow’s distance will be almost double today’s, so should go some way to restoring my average for the last few days. I expect to see several Sustrans mileposts along this stretch, so I’ll have fun photographing and mapping those as well as passing through several fairly well-known Scottish towns along the way such as Kinloss and Elgin before arriving at Banff.