Le2jog pix - 56k warning

zzpza · #1 11-18-2004, 04:36 PM

We didn’t really plan the trip too hard. We wanted to have daylight at both Land’s End and John O’Groats, and I also wanted to take a few pix of Loch Ness. So the plan was hatched to arrive in Land’s End in the evening while it was still light and then to drive to Lock Ness and park up somewhere and wait until daylight and then to push on to John O’Groats. The plan worked out pretty well with the exception of Land’s End. It took a little longer than expected to get there (partly my fault as I wanted to go across the Torpoint ferry) and when we arrived in Land’s End, it was dark and closed. Arse. I wandered around a bit with my camera, but found only accusing looks from the staff that were still there. It seems you have to pay to get to the area where the signpost is. In the end I had to settle for a poor pic of the front of the visitors center and an OK pic of a fishing trawler in very very low light (totally dark sky and the trawler was illuminated by a single 60W bulb).

Got back in the car, reset the fuel consumption on the computer and then set off – totally forgetting to take a note of the time. Luckily I had the time set correctly on my camera, so I got the time from the exif info in the last pic I took there. We left @ 17:59 on Monday 15th November 2004.

Many miles later it was still dark and much fuel had been consumed both by ourselves and the car. We parked up in a layby near Loch Ness at about 6AM while it was still dark and went to sleep for about three hours. We were taking a slightly scenic route getting to John O’Groats, going north past Glasgow and Fort William, then along the edge of Loch Ness, and then when we came back down south going over the Cairngorm Mountains and going past Edinburgh. Loch Ness is indeed very big.

The final push to John O’Groats took quite a long time as it was almost exclusively A-roads. There was also a lot of road works going on, but on a whole there was little hold up due to them (something my local council could learn from).

We arrived in John O’Groats at 13:55 on Tuesday 16th November 2004. Four minutes short of 20 hours, and that includes the three hours we slept in the layby. The BMW was very comfortable on the long journey, but a little too large and soft for the narrow windy roads though North Scotland. It was still fun none the less with some very demanding and challenging roads.

Even though the car is 15 years old and has now done over 160k miles, we didn’t have a single problem. We did manage to blow the aux power circuit fuse (30A!) with all the stuff we had in the car (GPS, PDA, fridge, inverter, phone charger, laptops, mp3 player, etc) but luckily a garage was not far away when it happened.