Cycling day 39: Nairn to Banff (Well, MacDuff actually…)

I’d expected to pass several Sustrans mileposts today, but not anywhere near the number that I ended up passing. If you read the words on most of the milepost designs you’ll see that 1000 were funded by the Royal Bank of Scotland as a millennium project. Actually there a few more than that as local authorities etc. have funded a few privately. I passed 13 mileposts today. So over 1% of all of those on the National Cycle Network. I covered over 70 miles today (the NCN had about 12,000 miles in total the last I knew), so it shows that the mileposts are quite disproptionately placed around the network — I should have only expected half of the number of mileposts that I actually saw. It’ll be great for OSM’s mapping when I get the data online though, especially as much of today’s route didn’t seem to be mapped yet, based upon what I saw on my Garmin GPS’s display (admittedly several weeks out of sync with the main OSM database now).

The weather was actually pretty good today, despite the forecast for showers. In reality hardly any spots of rain and quite a bit of pleasantly warm sunshine. Now that my brakes are working as they should again it was a highly enjoyable day of cycling, especially as the distance was back to a longer run again. Near to the end of the day’s journey there’s a split in NCR1, so as I was having fund and had some spare time I decided to cycle both braids to ensure that they’ll be mapped.

When I got to my accomodation in Banff there turned out to be some unexpected miles appended to my journey though. It turns out that they’d accidentally double-booked my room. They had tried to contact my home number, but of course I’ve been on the road for several weeks now, so missed those messages. They did helpfully arrange me some alternative equivalent accomodation in the adjacent town of MacDuff though, and luckily that’s not much further to cycle (in fact it’s not very far from part of the planned route for tomorrow). So, I’m now writing this posting from MacDuff instead of the expected Banff. I did get a large £20 donation from the B&B owner in Banff for the British Heart Foundation, whom I raising funds for by doing this ride. Thanks on behalf of both myself and the BHF for that.