unsmooth surfaces

Whilst I'd originally thought that Nicky popping out to meet one of her pals who used to live here but who now lives in Livingston would involve Nicky popping to Livingston with Edgar leaving me with a few free hours it turned out that she was popping up the road a bit to meet the person who used to live here but who now lives in Livingston who had popped through here to visit. This also turned out to be happening later than I had imagined with the result that I left the house a couple of hours after Instography's final Latitude update had revealed him to be in Airdie, meaning that he and Joe were probably already well past Linlithgow. I'd had vague notions of being able to leave the house in plenty of time to get to Linlithgow along the canal in time to intercept such blippers as were visibly Pedalling for Scotland but by leaving the house at one in the afternoon and not immediately setting off westward meant that I'd probably only have been able to intercept them if I'd headed straight to the finish.

I headed out along the canal anyway seeing as I hadn't been much of the way along it for a while. A couple of bits either side of the Scott Russell aqueduct have recently been re-dusted and compacted but beyond Ratho it's either mud or rocks or rocks-embedded-in mud, at times causing more rattles than the northbound bus lane along Leith Walk. Heading into a headwind at least meant that I wouldn't be going fast enough to cause any irreparable wheel-damage, though I began thinking that perhaps a few spare spokes would have been handy as well as the two additional spare tubes I'd added to my bag along with the default minimum single initial spare tube.

I vaguely considered escaping somewhere near Broxburn to go back past the viaduct but carried on a bit to Winchburgh on the grounds that I'd been along the road between Broxburn and Newbridge several times and that new road-knowledge is always useful, especially when it might represent an alternative to the canal, which I shall probably avoid until I can revisit it with chunkier tyres. I'd vaguely checked the route of the Pedal for Scotland course to check that it went past Linlithgow Palace (whither I knew how to get from the canal) but wasn't really expecting to find a huge mass of cyclists trundling past the end of the wee lane I'd taken when escaping the canal. As I'd originally been intending to see what it was like riding in a large group I carried on as far as the point where NCN1 crosses Whitehouse Road, from where I escaped to Cramond, headed along Silverknowes prom, went to the start of the Hawthornvale path, followed the NECN up to Roseburn (bumping into the P4S mass again) then continued trundling round until I'd done a Pedal for Scotland-equivalent 51 miles, without the inconvenience of having to be organised enough to catch a bus at six or having to deal with too many people of whom many seemed unused to roads, gears, brakes, pedals, traffic cones (and their characteristics regarding running into them on a bicycle at speed) or non-flat surfaces.

Hopefully some of the people who started or recommenced cycling in order to do the P4S will continue to do so. Whatever the individual behaviours witnessed, seeing so many cycles at once is pleasing; the equivalent number of cars would take up so much more space and make so much more noise, even just enough cars to carry the equivalent number of people as were present. Despite the chat, rattles, tyre-swishes and brake-squeak it was still quiet enough to be able to clearly hear such cars as were passing. Hopefully some people will have been made aware of alternatives to the M8 or the train, or have learnt of the existence of Sustrans signed routes and the off-road cycle path network.

However, even though I wasn't in it I might contact the organisers with some recommendations for additional things to stick in their Rider Information Brochure. For a start, there was no map, merely a stylised route guide showing the course out of context. It would have been extremely easy to supply a .gpx or .kml file showing the route as applied to a real map showing normal map things as well as the route across it. The recommendations of "take a waterproof" and "get your bike serviced beforehand" might have been accompanied by some more cycling advice: "Check you know how to ride your bike: does it have gears? Do you know how to change gear? Do you know how gears ought to be used? Do you know that you should really change down a bit before you hit an upwards slope so that you're not suddenly left straining and veering wildly from side to side in far too high a gear?" and so on. There were only a couple of slight hills on the bit I went along but one had a warning sign at the start, correctly anticipating the marked bunching which occurred at the bottom. There were a few experienced-looking cyclists behaving well, but some behaving like arseholes and steaming past everyone. This appeared to be inspiring some inexperienced-looking cyclists to try and overtake, which they did without looking first and without checking to see if there was an Asda lorry coming the other way on the half-closed road. Other people seemed unaware that hitting a full-sized traffic cone at fifteen miles per hour could have caused them some serious damage. Two morons seemed to think that skidding to a stop (twisting their bikes as they slewed to completely block the lane) was mightily clever. Many seemed unaware that they weren't always on completely closed roads, that other people might be coming the other way along the cycle paths and that they weren't protected by a magic invisible bubble of soft, impact-absorbing material. As well as the bored-looking people in fluorescent tabards (of whom only one (the guy pointing at the dropped kerb onto the shared-use footway on the approach to the Cramond Brig) was actively doing anything) there could be mobile marshals, riding along the course and dispensing advice or issuing warnings.