Killiecrankie to Cumwhinton
 Day
5
We set off the next day, still following the A9, through
Pitlochry, having to stay on the A9 for some of the way. We got
lost around Perth because we decided to bypass the city at a
crucial roundabout but ended up having no option but to take the
M90 or to backtrack into the town, and we did the latter. The
M90 took over as the principal southerly road we had to take a
very roundabout route to follow it without actually being on it.
We got horribly lost in Fife, went round in a few circles, went
the wrong way
round Loch Leven (which was nevertheless
quite pretty) and eventually arrived at the Forth Bridge. We
felt like we’d made it to our destination (a little village
called Kirknewton, Southwest of Edinburgh) but we were wrong. We
then got seriously lost trying to find the place, asked
directions a bunch of times, but eventually found the village
and pulled up at the amazing and very old house of more of
Charlie’s mother’s cousins. The estate included a venue at which
they were currently hosting a humanist wedding.
Day 6
We’d done quite a distance the previous day, 90 miles, but
before then we’d been doing some quite short distances and we
decided to up the pressure. We’d intended to spend three days
getting to Manchester but we decided instead that we could do it
in two. We set off for Edinburgh, weaved through the suburbs
(you aren’t allowed to cycle the A720) and set off South along
the A701 towards Peebles. We took the B7062 towards Innerleithen
and then got on to the B709 which we took all the way to
Langholm. On the way, near Ettrick we stopped at a pub for food
but they weren’t serving so they sent us on to the “Samuel Inn”
near Eskdalemuir. To our great surprise, when we arrived, this
turned out to be Samye-Ling, a Tibetan Centre, with a huge
pagoda, a statue of Buddha in the middle of a lake, and lots of
other things you don’t expect to find in the Scottish
countryside. There was a café, open till 5, which served us
soup, sandwiches and cake, quite expensive but very good, and
then we sat in their communal room, a bit like a youth hostel,
for an hour talking to a man who was making a prayer wheel out
of lego. Very odd.
 We
pushed on to the A7 at Langholm, where we bought some stuff to
eat that night. We crossed the border at 7pm, took some photos.
The house just on the Scottish side of the border had a
scarecrow type figure joyously dressed in tartan. The Cumbrian
countryside was starkly flat by comparison with Scotland. We
went through Carlisle, nothing special, got on to the A6, our
road for the next day, and went looking for a place to camp and
a pub to stop in. After asking some advice we got off the A6 and
stopped at the Lowther Arms in Cumwhinton. The kind owner told
us a place to camp and even made us breakfast in the morning.
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