Doon to Dunbar

Today, I finished the route I started yesterday. This image was taken with many others at the top of the ride, a spot I found pretty much by accident when I decided to follow a different route to my usual, up from The Brunt and over Doon Hill. That's the route I'll be taking in future! What a great explore :)

From right to left (and broadly near to far...) there's : My bike, then Doon Hill with its Iron Age settlement, then Dunbar and West Barns, the Bass Rock, Tyninghame Bay and North Berwick Law.

This just has to be better Large!

I rode up to Halls on the road, rather than cross-country, to join the route where I'd had to cut it short yesterday because of dark, cold, cloudy conditions - otherwise know as "evening" ;).

Today I took the retrogrouch hard-tail bike (as near as I have to a "normal" mountainbike) and I was so glad of that. Yesterday I had a really minimal single-speed cyclocross type bike which was great for yesterday's route, but today's terrain was much rougher, the hills were much steeper and it would have been very little fun on the cyclocross bike - mostly walking.

With the new gearing setup I fixed this morning (Full-length cable outer to the rear gear in case you care. Thanks to a £3 gear outer, I have completely dropped ideas of buying a new frame...), the problem of skipping gears under power went away completely and I just sailed around the county with confidence in my bike - love it. This bike has gears and brakes from 20 years ago which work so very well. Why change?

Lots more great East Lothian scenes from yesterday and (mostly) from today on Flickr. Please have a look, it was such a beautiful day.