Day 27:
Day 27: 'Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning' - Winston Churchill. My mind was racing too much for sleep so I resorted to ear plugs and a sleeping pill. I woke up at 9 feeling pretty good. I arrived before my poste restante and waited till 12 to pick it up. Then the best bridge crossing of the trip, the middle of the 3 Forth bridges. Because I magiced a 3 day section out of a 4 dayer I'm a day ahead of schedule. This is an advantage I capitalised on today by pushing on to Kinross and Milnthort, by Loch Leven in the Kingdom of Fife. This is beautiful country, like Ludlow and the Marches, like Launceston, like the South Downs and like home. I think I contributed about 19 or 20 miles today to the grand total, which took about 6 hours 35, not a great deal in the scheme of things so I guess this was something like a rest day. The only problem today was my little Silva compass that's got me so far. I used it obsessively all day yesterday and dumped it on the hotel floor with everything else I was wearing. I picked it up this morning to position myself north, my daily ritual, and the needle spun round in the opposite direction and wavered like a leaf in the breeze. The polarity appeared to have reversed, but not accurately enough to trust. Luckily today I only had to follow cycle route 1, well sign posted. But I'm not approaching the Cairngorms without a compass I can trust. Luckily the landlady at the Thistle Hotel at Milnthort informed the patrons of my plight and a young gentleman actually went home and brought his own expensive base plate Silva compass with the intention of giving it to me for free. Thank you sir! It's worth more than what I gave you for it. Your compass will get me through the mountains.
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| The Forth Rail Bridge. |
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| The Forth Road Bridge and the new bridge behind it. |
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| Looking back over South Queensferry to the Pentland Hills. |
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| The tops of the three Forth bridges. |
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| Loch Leven. |
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| Old above, new below. |
A note about the blog
I must be the only LEJOGer without a smart phone. This means I don't have the ability to update this blog when I'm on the trail. My support team back home kindly offered to update the blog for me, so this will be communicated by text message and written up on my behalf. It will therefore be brief and without photos. I will expand on this when I get back from my journal entries, dictaphone recordings and photo journal. The detailed account will be published as a book which will be available on Amazon.
Charity
Thank you to everyone who has made a donation to
Helping Hands for the Blind, a respectable local charity. You can make a donation
here. Using Gift Aid, the charity is able to claim an additional percentage of each donation from the government as part of the
Gift Aid scheme.
While I am not tracking how much has been raised, the charity themselves may wish to do that; leaving a note with your donation such as "LEJOG" will help them do that. To be frank, it's more important that they receive donations than it is for me to take credit; they're actually doing something important whereas I am going on what could be described as a holiday.
My books
Lastly and leastly, I am an independent author. Writing is a pleasure even if reading it isn't! I will write an account of my LEJOG journey in the form of a book which hopefully will encourage other people to give LEJOG a try (and probably discourage many more). If you want a copy, the first batch will be given free of charge. Ask and you shall receive...
My other books are available on Amazon:
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