I had the pleasure of heading off into Argyll and Bute this weekend with a buddy from London. We had the road bikes packed with a one man tent each, sleeping mats, one change of clothes, stove and tools. Pretty lightweight bikes although you could feel it on the big hills! Picture of bikes below in first link. (Can someone show me how to embed images - no idea what I'm doing wrong)
Overall Route - https://www.strava.com/routes/10463918
Friday - 56km - Helensburgh to Loch Fyne Brewery
We set off just about midday after catching the 10am train from haymarket. The roads were wet but drivers considerate as we headed up the A814, past various military bases and with some great views off across the loch. We rounded the loch-head and found the base of the Rest and Be Thankful road stretching ahead. The old road is accessible by a bollarded off section on the left. There were a few gates to lift our bikes over but overall we climbed the pass on the old road which was fantastic! The main road would have been miserable.
https://imgur.com/BQo1xZs
The decent down to Loch Fyne was awesome. Big clear lines in primary position. Great stuff. We finished day one off by heading to the Fyne Ales tap room at the head of the loch and sampling all the beers, then setting up camp a little way down the loch and heading to the Loch Fyne Oyster bar for an enormous dinner. Quite a wet campsite and a very sad amount of litter left by inconsiderate previous campers (inordinate numbers of cans of fosters, and burnt camping equipment scattered through the trees).
Saturday - 180km - Invarary to Ballahulich
We woke up to a beautiful day, packed up tents and headed to Invarary (30 mins from awake to on the road fully packed!)
https://imgur.com/y98Ru8U
The view from the campsite was the above picture - lovely clouds in the hills!
We rode down to Lochgilphead in a pretty speedy fashion. Able to maintain soem decent speeds with the bike packing gear only seeming to change our roadies from wippets into desert camels, able to carry great loads at speed over difficult terrain. This section averaged about 25kmph.
This was a great warm up for the next section heading gradually west touching a section of the Crinan Canal and then joining Sustrans route 78 off up to the west side of Loch Awe. This road was fantastic with challenging climbs and rewarding views. I got up to almost 70kmph on a decent which was exciting.
We had icecream at a lovely village shop and continued on northwards to some spectacular munro vistas (lots of short sharp climbs) and then turned west towards oban through some stunning valleys. This was a bit of a trudge with a tough road surface and we were lacking food. It was the slowest point in the trip. From LochGilphead to Oban we averaged about 20-22kmph with all the hills and certainly felt the drain in the legs.
Oban Fish Bar fueled us with a fish tea and we headed along the coastal route out of oban to avoid a bit of a main traffic out of town. At this point we wanted to smash out the 50km to our chosen pub for the evening, the Loch Levan Hotel in Ballachulich. We rejoined the Route 78 and realised there was a completely segregated shared use path heading our way. However it wasn't clear exactly what route it took, how far it went, or when it randomly turned off into a forest at 90 degrees from our road route, whether it would actually go the way we needed. We abandoned the worming path and hit the road again maintaining high speeds and bashing out the remaining 50km in just about 2 hours from Oban. The route is very pretty and the road was surprisingly quiet on a Saturday late afternoon. Imagine it'd be awful during the week though.
We found a cracking campsite on the beach and were treated to spectacular sunset before food and some beers before brandy and a fire into the wee hours back at the tent.
https://i.imgur.com/uEXJZ8E.jpg
Sunday - 25km to Fort William
Sunday we got rained on, rode up to Fort William and got the train home. Apologies to those on the train we hadn't so much as washed our faces since Friday morning (well we had brushed our teeth twice a day)
Overall a perfect mix of food, beer and cycling! Really showed that we could pack the bikes up in a really short time and have enough stuff to comfortably tour for up to a week considering we could easily have packed a few days rations. In fact if anything the good weather meant we'd both taken too many clothes!
We were able to travel at speed and comfortably climb 16% inclines without feeling unbalanced or like we were crawling. Let's call it speed touring!
My favourite moment was upon completing the 110 mile Saturday cycle my mate announced that he'd never cycled more than 110km before on his unloaded road bike. Considering I'd been mashing along assuming he was an old hand at distance this was pretty impressive from him (runner/rider/adventurous type)
Route 78 is recommended if you want an offroad route with great views. Although beware that it does involve a ferry at Corran if you want to do the whole thing.
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