Since day 1 of our trip Litchfield has been nagging me to write a blog entry but because he does such a good daily job with his postings it doesn't leave much for me to ramble about .

KEV'S TAKE 

You'd have thought with the passage of time since our first trip to Scotland in 2011 that those nasty , ornery , pesky , hills , mountains , undulations or whatever you care to call them would have eroded in size .What with global warming , Donald Trump stuffing the World , famine in East Africa and the price of bananas , makes sense to me that they should have .

In fact the opposite is the case ,they have become steeper and more frequent and these old legs of mine are going up and down in the one spot , but hopefully will get me through another 9 days of cycling before they throw in the towel .

As a cycle tourist you would be hard pressed to find a more ruggedly beautiful , isolated and at times climatically challenging , well most times come to think of it , than the Scottish Highlands and Outer Hebrides . Constantly pummeled by strong winds , driving rain and Summer temperatures in the low teens means this area is not for the average city slicker looking for a low key holiday .

If the wind happens to drop below 200kph then those pesky little critters called midges emerge in their gozillions ready to terrorise all exposed bits of skin . How can a tiny bug less than a mm long be such an annoying pest , even Litchfield comes up short when compared to them . 

When packing for this trip I included a tube of sunscreen , in hindsight a smidge on the optimistic side as we've only had 2 days where we've sighted Old Sol .

The Cricket World Cup has been a constant source of amusement for us . Ours daily ritual after arriving at our accommodation is to surf through about 200 channels to see if the Aussies are playing , we've only fluked it once .

For anyone who likes to get up when the sun rises at 3.30am and go to bed at 11.30pm when it's just dark , this is the place to be . So different to an Aussie Summer .

I've resisted the daily temptation to go with a full English breakfast partly due to that delicious Pommie delicacy , black pudding ( for the uninitiated it's congealed blood with some other goodies ) Scrambled eggs appeal a touch more .

The trip continues and hopefully I'll survive Litchy's 9th attempt ( this is our. 9th overseas trip ) to eliminate me , he's come mighty close in past trips so bring it on .