Highlands and lowlands

On Sunday evening we stayed at the Thistle Hotel just outside Kinross. Our friend Sarah Huxter lives locally and we had arranged to meet up when passing. Sarah very kindly picked us up from our hotel and took us to dinner at the Courthouse restaurant in Kinross, the food was amazing and really good to see Sarah on our route.

The next morning we had a bit of breakfast at the hotel and hit the road for 08:00.

We stopped for a second breakfast at McDonalds in Perth after about 30 miles.

Around midday we arrived in the town of Pitlochry. It was the first big town we had passed for a while and we were ready for lunch so stopped for food at McKays hotel.

We followed national cycle route 7 for most of the day. We had one of the longest single climbs of the trip up to Pass of Drumochter. This is the highest point on the national cycle network in Scotland at 462m.

The descent was also long and gradual and takes in lots of Highland scenery.

We stopped at Dalwhinnie whisky distillery to fill up our water bottles (with water). Unfortunately they didn't have a restaurant so we pushed on to the tuckshop in Newtonmore and had a decent meal to keep us going for the rest of the afternoon.

We arrived in Aviemore and found there were lots of shops, the town itself is a ski resort in the winter and popular with hikers and mountain bikers in the summer. We got dinner and breakfast for the morning from Tesco before checking into Eriskay B&B for the night.