An early start to the first day of our journey home. We were booked on an early train and if we missed it our tickets, and most importantly our bike reservations, wouldn't be valid on later services. We packed our bags, had some jam on toast for breakfast at the backpackers' hostel we'd been staying at and made our way up the hill to Thurso railway station.
The train was on time, and we joined 40 or so other passengers who were also joining the train here. We felt sorry for a couple of Australian cycle tourists who'd also stayed overnight at the hostel; they weren't allowed to board the train with their bikes because they didn't have a reservation.
The train for our ride to Fort William was equiped with 6 bicycle spaces and the guard ended up allowing 10 bicycles on the train in total. In spite of being at the end of the End2End cycle route the trains to Thurso only have space for 2 bikes, which I think is a bit crazy. I had to go to a lot of trouble to get our reservations, but they were certainly worth it!
The ride to Inverness took just under 4 hours. I thought "The far North line" as it is known - a name that could have been chosen by Philip Pullman - was less spectacular than the west highland line, but the scenery was still beautiful. Conditions started out a bit misty and gloomy, but brightened up later.
On arrival at Inverness at about lunchtime we dumped our stuff at the SYHA hostel and proceeded to kill the day and a half we had spare before our train home.
We had a KFC for lunch and then decided to go and watch a film. Inverness has no cinema in the city centre, so we spent a while trying to understand the incomprehensible bus timetables so we could reach the retail park on the far outskirts of the city - about two miles away. We saw "Night at the Museum 2", which was good fun, then went back to the city centre for dinner.
The following day dragged on a bit. We'd already sampled the delights of Inverness in an afternoon, but yet we still needed to find more to do. Bus and boat tours of Loch Ness were appealing but also expensive and frankly we were still too tired to be bothered with travelling to where they departed from. The Inverness museum was closed because it was Sunday, which we all know is the most unlikely day of the week for tourists to want to visit it... not.
In the end we wandered around all the shops and sat around in a pub for a lot of the afternoon. On any other holiday one would ask what would the point have been, but we didn't feel too bad given our need to recover from all that cycling.
An early start and a long train journey home tomorrow.
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