Day 5 - Theres Something About Tarmac?

We awoke this morning in Dunvegan House on the Isle of Arran and with the prospect of doing over 80 miles without Dave. We initially had a calm start with a lovely breakfast looking out to sea. Dunvegan House is one of the more formal B&Bs we have stayed at but very nice, friendly and definitely recommended...also very useful for the Ferry as the port is 500 yards away. I said the start was initially calm as the time went very quickly and all of sudden we were sprinting for the Ferry...in the end we were the last people on the Ferry waiting for us to get on so they could shut the door! When we were on the Ferry we met a couple who were also cycling the JOGLE for a mountain rescue charity but they were doing it the sensible way and doing it in over 3 weeks and having rest days. The Ferry was good it was one like the type you would get across to France unlike the previous days ferry which an open drive on and drive ferry (why am I telling you this - tiredness I would suggest…) We arrived at Ardrossan sorted ourselves and got on our way. Upon cycling out of Ardrossan a bloke shouted us to stop, we pulled over and quickly realised it was a bloke we spoke to at the Oban campsite. He pulled us over to see if we wanted a coffee and to find out how he could keep up to date on our progress ...we weren’t able to stop as we had just started for the day but as ever from our time in Scotland everybody has been so friendly and supportive of us. In terms of our actual ride today it was pretty uneventful with the exception of TARMAC...the roads today were last maintained in the year 1536, absolutely awful, boneshaking, bike breaking roads which are very hard to ride on plus add all the pot holes and your average ride time very quickly comes to single figures - we do now have vibration white finger (Dave thinks everybody will know what this is ...if not look it up and provide answers on a postcard...well on our comments page). The good news is the sun was out all day and Damian's white panda eyes are getting whiter! So we are now Tarmac specialists and do know the differences between silk tarmac and tarmac made out of granite after an earthquake. We prefer silk. Anyway on with the blog...today was a hard day but it was made a lot easier by the fact that the support vehicle met us every 20 miles which was very motivating. We did stop in a place called Delmellington for lunch although there wasn’t much choice for food and where we did eat it took an age for the food to come so we just had to get going and the van bought the food to us 10 miles later. We rode the last 20 miles with both Jen and Steve struggling with their knees, Steve in particular has a swollen knee and tomorrow will be a real test of his ability to continue. We are realising that this ride and the pace we doing it at - no amount of training can prepare you for this and we are definitely being tested. We arrived at Phil and Mo's ‘B&B’ in Dumfries - which we can definitely recommend - to a warm welcome and cuppa at 7pm. I have missed a lot of today’s ride out as it was pretty straight forward, hilly and fairly hard but largely uneventful. Our stats for today are: 86 miles in 6hrs 15 mins and an average of 13.7mph. Our ride tommorrow is the biggest and one of the hardest of the ride at 91 miles and covering Shap and Cumbria....Here we go...! Thanks all for reading and again please come back and keep commenting. The sponsorship is still going up which is just brilliant. Thanks to you all. The Smiley Milers.