After breakfast, we rolled the bike down the B&B's extraordinarily steep driveway, and then rode it down the hill into Tobermory and on to the ferry jetty on the harbour.  From there, we took the ferry across the Sound of Mull to Kilchoan in Ardnamurchan. 

We'd decided to nip over to the beach at Sanna before heading to Salen (or possibly Acharacle, depending on how we felt).  So we rode over the hills to Sanna Bay, where we were rewarded by a virtually empty beach composed of glorious silver sands - here we had a drum up. On the walk over to the beach we walked past former crofting fields, with streams populated with a variety of small wildlife, and with butterworts growing around the banks.  We were also rewarded with spectacular views of some of the Inner Hebrides (Coll etc).

We woke to see sun and clouds, and this later cleared to give clear skies and, yes, more hot weather! However this did make for an excellent day of cycling on Mull, an island we'd not visited in about 15 years.

On a weekday morning, Oban is mighty busy, and getting to the ferry was a little awkward (and I even made a wrong turn in the 0.75 miles from the B&B to the ferry terminal!). Once there, we bought tickets (one of the 'Island Hopsctoch' tickets) and embarked, along with many others, including 6 coaches - everyone seemed to be heading for Iona.

The day began and finished with cloudless blue skies - for much of the day, we had puffy white clouds. Unfortunately this didn't lessen the temperature, and part way through today's ride, I had to stop wearing my helmet as a consequnce of the torrents of sweat pouring out of it. We decided to try and reach Oban today, a distance of over 70 miles, much of it on main trunk roads.
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For me, the day began lethargically, and it wasn't until Kenmore that we were rolling effectively. Kenmore lacks B&Bs, though there's a good tearoom (closed when we passed), a hotel, and a number of what looks like holiday cottages. We paused at Kenmore to take a few photographs, in cluding one looking across to the Loch Tay Crannog Centre, featuring a reconstruction of a crannog, a prehistoric settlement built on a platform on stilts over water.  From Kenmore, we pressed on via the road on the north side of Loch Tay - this is a fair bit easier the that on the south side, which is a recommended cycle route. There's not much accomodation to be had other than the Lawers Hotel until you get to Killin, where there are plenty of B & Bs. En route to Killin, we passed a Google Streets photography car, though judging from the speed it was doing, we doubt it was active.Along the way,the landscape was excellent, with high mountains to our right (for example Ben Lawers) and the glassy smooth waters of Loch Tay to our left. 

After a cream tea in tearoom at Killin, we set forth with an expected 55 miles or so to still to cover (this was at 12.00, with 23 miles already on the clock). Next point was Crianlarich, followed soon after by Tyndrum - neither are particularly interesting, but do offer food and accommodation, mostly aimed at the climbing fraternity. For the rest of the day, we contented ourselves with bananas and snack bars, washed down with warm water from our bottles (vaguely plasticky tasting after two days in the heat). At one point, we paused for Carol to relieve her hot feet in a stream, in order to stave off foot cramps.

After excellent hospitality in Tayport, we set off just after 9.00am towards Dundee, in spetacular brilliant sunshine. Crossing the Tay Bridge, the Tay estuary looked particularly beautiful, particularly with the backdrop of the Braes of the Carse behind it.

The bridge itself offers a descent for about 2 miles, and the traffic was comparatively light. Once in Dundee, it's relatively easy to scoot off the bridge and round past the rail station and Discovery Point, then onwards into countryside through Invergowrie to Kingoodie.

This story came across my radar this morning (Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension).  This seems bad news to me, and exemplifies one aspect of Microsoft's software model that I really rather dislike in comparison to, for example, how Ubuntu rolls out its updates.

Turns out this Firefox add-on, which is installed rather stealthily as part of a regular Windows .NET update, has its uninstall option disabled, which means Windows users need to go through a complex process to remove this, as described at annoyances.org (Remove the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant (ClickOnce) Firefox Extension).  Annoyances.org says:

This event saw the return of Team Grumpy to the NBRC club time trial scene. Unfortunately, this wasn't accompanied by nice time trialling weather.

I rode to work on the Cougar TT bike, in pretty steady rain.  It wasn't until I got there that I discovered that I'd not brought my racing aero helmet.  well, that was annoying, but not terminal.  During the course of the day, the rain eased, but the wind seemed to build up so that it was considerably stronger than the 15 mph forecast by the BBC.

I was unfortunate enough to see the BNP's party political broadcast last night on TV.  I am not sure of what the rules for such broadcasts are, but in terms of pure misrepresentation of historical fact and by sailing pretty close to the wind on stirring up racial prejudice, it was a pretty nasty piece of work.

Nick Griffin portrayed the Second World War as having been won by (exclusively) white christian Brits.  Never mind the millions of Soviet citizens, never mind the Poles and the Czechs, never mind our colonial troops of various races and nationalities, never mind the US military, never mind all the others, why should the BNP let a little bit of historical fact get in the way of their vile outpourings?  I hope more of the public care about the truth.

I am planning on posting updates to this website while on cycle tour, in which I will describe our progress around Scotland.  In a classic Baldrick style,  I have a cunning plan.  This plan entails taking my little OQO handheld WinXP device (left).  Of course this is a pretty creaky little machine, and the keyboard won't lend itself to particularly lengthy write-ups, but still, I should be able to keep updated with our progress round the planned itinerary.  Ideally I'll be able to upload images as well.

This all depends crucially on whether I can get the Vodafone mobile broadband USB stick to behave (and indeed on finding a reasonably quick connection in the wilderness).  You can see the truly Baldrickian nature of this cunning plan emerging, I think...

Our paper describing a new allele of the Drosophila WRN-like exonuclease DmWRNexo  and on it's biochemical characterisation is finally out in print (its been available online for some time):

Boubriak, I., Mason, P. A., Clancy, D. J., Dockray, J., Saunders, R. D. C., Cox. L. S. 92009) DmWRNexo is a 3′–5′ exonuclease: phenotypic and biochemical characterization of mutants of the Drosophila orthologue of human WRN exonuclease.  Biogerontology   10; 267-277  DOI: 10.1007/s10522-008-9181-3

This is the likely itinerary for our 2009 Scottish tour.  It's still not written in stone, as we need to contact various people we want to meet up with en route.  I'm planning to update this blog as we go (Vodafone 3G access permitting!).

Day 1 - Tayport to Aberfeldy or Kenmore.  Hoping to stop off an visit an old friend near Dunkeld.