{"id":587,"date":"2009-06-02T22:22:46","date_gmt":"2009-06-02T21:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/?p=587"},"modified":"2009-06-02T22:22:46","modified_gmt":"2009-06-02T21:22:46","slug":"wave-you-are-on-islay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/?p=587","title":{"rendered":"Wave, you are on Islay!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Our family half term holiday was to Islay on the West Coast of Scotland this year. Into the car went 3 bikes plus tagalong for the trip\u00a0north. We caught the ferry over in somewhat breezy conditions and stayed in a cottage on a remote farm on the North West side of the Island. The cottage at Coull Farm<\/a> even had a garage to keep all our toys\u00a0nice and dry.\u00a0
\nOther than rides with Holly and Cath I trained most days on the quiet lanes, though something I noticed very quickly both riding and driving is that all the locals wave at each other. I can understand it when letting others pass at the numerous passing places on the rough single track roads but they do it everywhere, those friendly Scotts.
\nOn my first ride coming back on the road from Port Charlotte I kept coming across groups of drunk Germans, all swaying down the middle of the road. The cause was obvious in the next village, Bruichladdich, whose distillery’s open day was just finishing.<\/p>\n

I had a great ride on Jura following the only road on the island, but spent the afternoon hungry after the only cafe shut its doors minutes before we arrived, apparently sold out with the large numbers of people attending the whiskey festival !<\/p>\n

For the rest of the week we struggled with high winds, in fact I had to abandon one recovery ride soon after leaving the farm, it just being too dangerous. In fact I didn’t really need to pedal back into the yard, I was just blown along !<\/p>\n

My final ride on Islay was another recovery ride back from the Kilchoman distillery<\/a> to the ferry port. We \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a>learnt that we had actually got one of the last ferries back from Jura on Thursday before it broke down after\u00a0losing an engine. Apparently this then left lots of standed\u00a0tourists on Jura with no way of getting their cars off. As we departed on our large ferry for the mainland\u00a0we were treated to the sight of the\u00a0little Jura ferry running the gauntlet against the tide using just its one engine but being shadowed by the Islay Lifeboat just in case on a rescue mission to get the stranded people off.<\/p>\n

Islay is a great place for quiet biking though some of the roads are a little too rough for lightweight road wheels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our family half term holiday was to Islay on the West Coast of Scotland this year. Into the car went 3 bikes plus tagalong for the trip\u00a0north. We caught the ferry over in somewhat breezy conditions and stayed in a cottage on a remote farm on the North West side of the Island. The cottage … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Wave, you are on Islay!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-587","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cycling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=587"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":591,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/587\/revisions\/591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=587"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=587"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.stodgell.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=587"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}