Category: moosling

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bikes general moosling travel trip reports

Scotland: Mountain biking with six eggs

At 4am I wake up as Alex crashes about in the tent. At 5am I’m still awake, give in and get up to pee, and it’s already getting light. I wonder if the tent will dry out before we have to pack it up – it seems like a dry and sunny morning. Alex and Finn are snoring.

A little later on, we’re all awake and lying in the tent. Someone comes by and yells out “Hello Australia!” It’s the farmhouse lady; she offers to cook us breakfast and bring it to the tent. It’s tempting, but we decide we should not be quite that lazy.

She gives me six fresh chicken eggs after taking our photo for their new website: “We’re on a thing called facebook”. I bundle them up, but cunningly don’t put them all in the same basket. Three in my front pouch, three in my feed bag. We’re about to ride a rough rocky descent – it should be fine?

We set off along rough roads and through logging areas. Waking up as we climb uphill, then thoroughly enjoying the descent to Loch Ness. Except for the gates. So many gates in Scotland! Not that many sheep or cattle, definitely many many wooden gates that we have to open and close behind us. But the track turns smooth and narrows to single track, and blue sky starts peeking out between the clouds.

Drumnadrochit is a Loch Ness monster tourist town. It’s a bit scary. Scrounging groceries from a convenience store, Finn gets icecream, we get toasties (woo, toasties everywhere in this place!), then we keep heading on up and out of town.

The path we’re travelling along is also one a lot of hikers travel – the Great Glen Way. And we spend a good chunk of today leapfrogging with a couple of hikers. It’s nice and friendly and all, but serves as a humbling reminder of how slowly we’re travelling.

We wander onto a proper car-road to visit Corrimony Cairn. A chambered cairn for collective burials, from the Bronze Age or so. It’s surrounded by standing stones, and the cairn has a central chamber and a crawl through entrance.

Scotland, like the rest of the UK, seems a little wild. Not the wild of mountains and bears, but an old kind of wild, of land lived in forever, with faeries and pixies and other worlds that you could fall into.

Arriving in Cannich, we decide to stop for the afternoon, staying in a highly civilised dry and grassy camprground. This pleases Finn, as it has a playground, and he finds a new friend to play with (a Portugese girl named Alice).

We’re all tired still, maybe we do have some jetlag. Everyone is suffering from lethargy legs. On the plus side, my trick of running my seat low seems to be reducing irritation in my injured left knee, and it’s feeling ok so far.

Oh, and I didn’t break any of the eggs – I got them all to camp safely and we had scrambled eggs for pre-dinner.

Distance: 35km
Elevation gain: 480m
Location: Abriachan Eco Campsite to Cannich

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bikes general moosling travel trip reports

Scotland: The Beginning

The Players
Megan: Red hair, bloodshot eyes from nights of insomnia, sore left knee from injury
Alex: Beard, glasses, hairy legs that may be concealing a weapon
Finn: Nearly 5yo, batman tshirt, Salomon sneakers, cute glasses, lazy eye, watches cartoons and charms service people into giving him things

The Flights
Calgary – Halifax (~5 hours)
Halifax – Glasgow (~5.5 hours)

Surprising no-one, we didn’t get much sleep on the way over.

On arrival, the immigration officer asks what we’re doing. We explain.

“You keen cyclists then?” he asks.

We concur.

“You must be keen to come and ride over here!”

Our plan had been to assemble bikes at the airport and then ride, like in the good old days. But we’re exhausted and there’s now a small child into the equation. After lengthy debate (“Should we just get a taxi?” “Definitely!”) we get a taxi to our air bnb. It’s in Paisley.

I remember the comedian Frankie Boyle having mentioned Paisley… oh yes, he was making fun of how useless the Labor party is: “… like getting lessons in empathy from someone living in Paisley.” Obviously a nice spot then.

We walk about to find some food, and avoid making eye contact with the Glaswegians who look like they’d glass us given the slightest provocation. Trying to talk to people, we struggle to adapt to the Glaswegian accent, and have to keep asking people to repeat themselves.

We ask for lettuce on our hamburgers, and the proprietor questions, “You’re not from round here then?”

Grand plans lead to nothing, we spend most of the day and the following night sleeping. That’s good, we seem to have pushed through extreme sleep deprivation to avoid jetlag altogether.

The next morning we get on our bikes and start to ride off. Alex realises his handlebars are on backwards. I realise my fork has no air. My cables are rubbing. My seat is too low. Eventually we get everything sorted and break the magical 30-metres-away-from-the-house barrier.

We’re headed into the city to catch the train: it’s about 20km of cycle trail, some narrow, overgrown and covered with broken glass, but gradually looking better as we get close to downtown.

Finn has his first boat ride as we catch a tiny ferry across the river. He’s in tears, it’s too noisy. As we get closer to downtown Glasgow there’s a tall ship in the river, the sound of bagpipes, men in kilts, and seagulls (that Finn keeps calling eagles).

Getting bikes onto other forms of transport can be a challenge, and it had taken a bit of debate to let us book the ticket with our 2.5 bikes (“I know bike trailers aren’t allowed, but this isn’t a bike trailer, is a trail-a-bike… it’s a folding bike! It folds up, we promise!”). We approach the train station nervously, tickets in hand. A Scotrail man swoops down on us, and we cower and look apologetic – but he is lovely and helpful, he just wants to know where we’re headed and help us get to exactly the right spot with the minimum of hassle. Brilliant.

In the train carriage there’s a great little nook that fits the bikes nicely. The Streamliner gets folded up and poked into a stripy plastic bag and stowed with the normal luggage.

It’s Finn’s first train ride. He had been worried it would be too noisy, but instead thinks it is wonderful. “I think this is a woosh train Mama…. Trains are even faster than planes. Or helicopters.”

We switch trains in Perth – into a carriage that just has a narrow nook to poke the bikes into, which we manage to get to work… just. It’s not really designed for the ludicrously wide handlebars that come with 29” or 29+” tyres. After a couple more hours we arrive in Inverness, and are greeted with tourists, bagpipes and old buildings.

We pick our way out of town, uphill along the Great Glen Way, and it starts to rain. Then it doesn’t. Then it does again.

After a few hours of this, we’re wet and tired when we start cycling past magical hand painted signs pointing us towards a Walkers Campground & Café. They promise scrambled eggs. And then coffee. Alex begins to suspect that it’s a trap.

We decide to risk it.

We’re greeted by a happy Swedish man who points out a few flat spots that would work for our tent, then brings us tea, coffee and shortbread, and tells us about his recent kayaking trip along the west coast of Canada. He also warns us about the pigs – they’re just wandering about the place, and will eat all our food if we don’t hang it.

We cook dinner, assemble the tent, and hide from the midges. We’ve covered 39km today. It’s 8pm. Time for bed.

Distance: 17km + 21km
Elevation gain: 50m + 360m
Location: Paisley to Glasgow Queen St Station + Inverness station to Abriachan Eco Campsite

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canada general moosling snow

A winter flashback

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I made a video! Finally, Finn’s winter adventures have been cobbled together, relying on Youtube now rather than Vimeo as a host due to the vagaries of auto copyright detection software.

The moral to the winter was that it’s harder to get out on big long adventures now that he’s big enough that we can’t just carry or tow him around, but not big enough to have big days under his own steam – at least not out in the cold. As a result, our day trips have gotten smaller in scope for the time being. On the plus side, he seems to be growing. I suspect I only have a few years to go before he is out-skiing me.

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canada general hiking moosling

West Wind Pass

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Hiking adventure!

West Wind Pass is just 5km return, but a nice taste of Kananaskis hiking. You get some of the views, and none of the scree. Perfect for flat-landers who still don’t have the hang of hikes with huge elevation gain, and perfect for boys who are declaring loudly to all and sundry that they don’t want to go up a mountain, and they just want to play minecraft/lego.

We had a short picnic session at the pass, re-enacted the scene from the Lion King (I’m very tempted to borrow another baby and come up and try this another time, when the light is a bit more suitable).

Back down above Spray Lakes…

Before heading home we made a quick diversion to this lovely mossy patch, which is a few hundred metres from the road on a nearby trail. It’s one of my favourite close-to-the-road spots in Kananaskis.

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bikes canada general moosling

A grand Moosling adventure

We set out for a bike ride together, the Moosling and I. I was thinking we’d head out along the Legacy Trail for a few kilometres and then turn back again. The longest ride he’d done on his own bike was just 6km or so.

But once we started riding towards Banff, he was pretty adamant that he was going to ride the whole way there. We’d done it with him on the trail-a-bike plenty of times. And at least one of those times he’d been pedalling pretty much the whole way. I was a little short on snacks, but I figured we may as well ride half way and then see how we were going.

The other concern was weather – it’s been typical June in the mountains weather recently. Unsettled, with random bouts of rain or thunderstorms. We had shell jackets, but not full rain gear, not enough to make it pleasant riding for the length of time it would take us to get to any place dry if there was torrential rain while one of us was riding a tiny bike with 14″ wheels.

But we got to the Valley View picnic area, the trusty half-way point with the red chairs, and he barely wanted to stop. There was a brief snack break, then he was back on the trail and yelling out at me to come on. The boy is fond of Banff.

He spent a lot of time trying to run over the plants on the side of the trail on the second half of the journey, and frequently coming to a stop after miss-steering at super low speeds. He was also getting quite sick of my reminders to keep right, and started yelling at me whenever I mentioned it. While still tending to waver over into the left half of the trail.

We got through it all with increased levels of singing, and he sped up as we rounded the corner and started to draw closer to Banff. And started to yell out “I’m really excited Mama!” and bouncing up and down on his bike.

We pulled in at the Wildflour Bakery just under four hours and twenty five kilometres after setting out from home.

He was filled with joy at the prospect of banana-chocolate muffin, toasted cheese sandwiches and frozen yoghurt (that I told him was icecream, shhh). And was perfectly happy to keep riding around Banff – I think he may have also been ok with riding back home again, but we got a lift back home again instead of pushing our luck.

In the words of the hero of the story, while headbanging in the waffle shop to the tunes of Tina Turner’s ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’: “Mama, this song is making me eat!” … and he hasn’t stopped eating since we got back home.