A Differerent Pace

While I like to challenge myself on ITTs sometimes it's just nice to travel in a more relaxed manner. Cath had long ago booked the week of the HT550 ride as holiday with a view to riding it but working from home and a short spell of Covid had put paid to that. Still, a week in Scotland was not to be sniffed at. I'd a few "trails" in mind to explore, some had been talked about here and there but to some extent they were definitely "trails less travelled". We'd actually nearly two weeks to play with so no rush, really we'd just see where the time and weather led us.

We elected not to take the tarps but use the tent instead. A couple of reasons: a bit more protection should the weather turn; midge season was starting. Slightly heavier (750g each when split) and a bit more awkward to carry the poles but the extra comfort would be worth it.

Similarly with cooking kit - usually we go with alcohol/meths stoves and have simple "boil water, add to something dehydrated" type meals plus a bag of chocolate something or other. We took a small gas stove, a lightweight frying pan, oil, pre-chopped onions and veg, herbs, spices, etc. and made something a bit tastier. Not that you can't do that on a meths stove but the fuel usage does go up for longer cooking times and meths isn't energy dense so you end up needing a lot of it. For three of the nights out we took wine! Small bottles (17cl or whatever) on a couple of nights but a full bottle of white on one night that sat in the river chilling while we cooked and generally faffed about. One thing about not taking lots of cooking kit is due to packing it, pots and pans are just awkward to pack on a bike, so it got us thinking about making some full frame bags for the bikes. Depending on frame size there's a limit to the diameter of a pan packed inside one, there's also a limit to the pan depth of about 100mm due to Q-factor and the like. Most pans however maintain proportions and increase depth at the same time as increasing width. The only problem then would be fitting a water bottle or being forced to go to a backpack but it should be possible to have a twin compartment bag with the rear one sized to fit a water bottle or maybe a Sigg bottle if I was taking the MSR stove.

Perhaps the best indication of our overall pace, attitude, was that our bivvies/camps lasted close to fourteen hours, each! The antithesis of "arrive late, leave early" though being in the Highlandas and only three weeks away from mid-summer meant that "darkness" only really lasted from 2300-0300 at most. In fact bivy time seemed to outweigh riding time and other stopped time such as cafés combined. We seemed to arrive in the 1800-1900 time frame and would leave around 0900. Dead lazy! This being the Highlands, no-one was bothered.

We'd ridden the Deeside Trail from Ballater over by Lochnagar down to Braemar (with café stop of course) and then on to Derry Lodge. Six hours or so for 52km but only 4 1/2hrs riding. It was just 6pm when we got there, masses of daylight left but it meant that we could spend time to find a camp spot away from everyone else - absolutely no need to crowd anyone when there's plenty of room. We got the tent put up in the afternoon sunshine (it needed some drying after the deluge of the previous night) and just chilled. I'm making a brew when I notice movement in the river beside me. There's a couple of, very small, brown trout feeding in the evening. A bit of investigation and there's another four using the trunk of a fallen tree as cover. The trout were small, I'd be surprised if they were 100g, and it got me wondering both how big the fish grew in these rivers and how long it took them to do so as there's not a lot of apparent food other than the gluts of Mayfly, etc.

A couple of days later we were camped right on a gravel shoal "in" the Quoich Water river bed as it was the only flat area around. As I was cooking tea there were a couple of small trout rising to snatch mayfly dancing over the water. Obviously the rivers have enough food for these predators, a bit surprising as somewhere I'd picked up on a comment that Cairngorm rivers were somewhat sterile due to the granite base. (need to dig out where I found that, might just have been a misinterpretation on my part).

Overall our riding speed wasn't much slower than when doing an ITT, it's just that we weren't bothered about the stops and the proportion of riding time to stopped time was much lower.