Maps send us round the bend !

H was bordering on a meltdown only 8kms from the days finish, exhausted from punching into strong winds, competing with traffic on busy roads and having to deal with his Maps Me navigational device which tortuously took us on a 10km loop earlier in the day - Kev was giving serious thought to tapping out !

The day had started well enough on a chilly morning befitting Kev's arctic artire, when we escaped Innerleithen taking the Peebles rail trail right beside the river Tweed. Entering Peebles traffic picked up considerably as we soon realised that we were cycling near the major routes between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

Not far out of Peebles things started going horribly wrong as our navigation device took us on a 10km loop that included hills, forest trails, muddy paths and a river crossing before we finally realised that we were lost

With no confidence in navigational devices we took a day time celestial reading (useless) before finally "guessing" ourselves back on track ! We completed a wide pass of a number of busy A roads before taking soup and afternoon tea at Broughton. Here we made our 2nd mistake by listening to a local (& ignoring our navigational devices) who not only sent us way out of our way but put as on some dodgy high speed roads.

With Kev faltering we finally took a direct route to our destination of Carstairs competing with speedy peak hour traffic riding on a road with bugger all verge (scary).

Both of us were seriously relived to finally enter Carstairs well after 5pm having travelled nearly 20kms more than we'd planned.

While Carstairs doesn't have a lot going for it (the pub we were staying in shut at 7pm) - it does at least have a train station and with horrendous weathered predicted for the next 24 hours the odds of us taking a train to the ferry harbour of Ardrossan tomorrow are pretty damned high !



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