Check

Fred and I ventured into town to try and buy train tickets (we have vouchers that we can use and we need to meet an actual person to process them). We should have booked a week ago - good grief. The system doesn't make it easy to travel with bicycles at all. You have to go through the whole booking system for each potential train and it's only at the end that you find out whether or not there are bicycle spaces. There should be a search term that's just for bicycle availability. It would save hours.

There are no bicycle spaces on the return leg on either the 20th or 21st for both direct trains from Inverness to London and trains from London to Edinburgh and Edinburgh to London, so we're going to use our sleeper flexipass tickets for the Friday night and take the folding bikes, which can fit (just) in the cabin. It also means we can put them on a bus if we need to for any reason (i.e. getting to Ullapool or back if the bike bus is full). It's a bit of a pain touring on a folder, but I've done it before, although not on the folder I currently own. However, it's the same design as the one that was stolen in 2012 so should do me proud.

Exhausted from our train shenanigans, we lunched at the Scandinavian Kitchen and trotted to the British Museum to see the Lewis Chessmen. I love their expressions. All being good, we'll be cycling in Lewis in a few days.

In the meantime, there's a few bits and pieces of work to get done and one cat to placate. He knows we're packing.