Cycling day 41: Ellon to Stonehaven

I passed through Aberdeen today following National Cycle Route 1. It’s interesting to note how white many of the cycle route signs are in the city. In one case somebody had stuck stickers over the top to make things visible again (See photo). They must have been up for a long time to have faded this much. It makes it a bit more difficult to navigate when the arrows, let alone the direction they’re pointing in, are hardly visible.

There are plenty of advanced stop lines in central Aberdeen, and I’ve been trying to make a note of which approaches to the traffic lights they’re on to be able to enter this data later (For the OpenStreetMap readers amongst you I’m using a relation of type advanced_stop_line to handle these, working in a similar way to one of type stop. Hopefully we’ll be able to use them as a hint to the routers at some point?). However it’s not always easy to snap photos of the ASLs on each approach whilst waiting at stopped traffic lights, because vehicles have a tendancy to drive over them just when the picture gets taken. It’s even harder when the lights are in my favour.

Past central Aberdeen the cycle route heads to the coast. Cycling then became more difficult because there was a noticable off-shore wind. I was glad when the cycle route headed inland again for a while.

I came into Stonehaven down a reasonably sized hill. On the way I passed the “Welcome to Stonehaven” sign and caught a glance of it saying that the person that invented the pneumatic tyre was born here. Quite apt for a lengthy cycling trip I feel. I also notice along the high street that there’s a shop that claims, somewhat more dubiously, to be where the deep fried Mars Bar came to be born.