12 October: Edinburgh to Glasgow

After brekkie at Auld Jock's we hit the road. Well, we hit the cycle route. 

We were taking two cycle routes, first along the Union Canal to Falkirk, and then along the Clyde Canal to Glasgow. 

Easy riding! We had no idea there was a canal that runs practically right to the center of Edinburgh. The pedestrian traffic slowed us down a bit, but we never had to stop for car traffic! Yay!

We had to wind our way under a bunch of overpasses, and sometimes the path was really narrow! It was always a blind turn, and a few times we nearly ran headlong into a cyclist coming the oppposite direction. We got in the habit of ringing our bells before turning under the bridges, and that helped. 

Swans! And lots of ducks, too. We saw some canal boats, and waved at the folks puttering along

the canal at the speed limit of 3 mph. 

The union canal was built between1812 and 1822, and was used for a long time to transport stone from quarries to Edinburgh to support the building boom of the New Town. The barges were horse drawn, and that's why there's a path along the side that can be used for the cycle paths. The canals are still use today by canal-holiday boats, and restaurant boats that serve tea and coffee. 

The canal is nearly thirty miles long and with no locks to raise or lower boats - the entire canal is at the same elevation. That means that when the canal comes to a valley, it's continued on an aqueduct!  

This was the longest aqueduct we crossed, and we were way off the ground!

Here's a view from the aqueduct to a rail bridge. The aqueduct we're on looks very much the same as the rail bridge. Amazining to consider the engineering behind a bridge that's filled with water to carry boats and doesn't leak!

At Linlithgow, about 15 miles west of Edinburgh, we visited the Linlithgow Palace. This place is stately and HUGE!

The Palace was originally started  in the 1200s, but a portion was destroyed in 1424 and was promptly rebuilt. Numerous kings added on to the palace, or had sections of it expanded or rebuilt. There are a few signs of the additions if one looks closely.

Significantly, Mary, Queen of Scots, was born in the palace in 1542, and stayed in the palace frequently during her reign. It is said that her mother, Mary of Guise, haunts the palace. 

The palace was used off-and-on by Scottish royalty until about the 16th century, but was not used much after that. Bonnie Prince Charlie visited the palace on his march south in 1745, and the fountain shown below was said to flow with wine in honor of his visit. 

The palace was burned out in 1746 by the English after defeating the Scots at Culloden, and fell into disrepair. Starting in the early 1900s, the palace was conserved, and is maintained now by Historic Scotland. 

This is the great hall of the palace. At the far end of it you can see Melinda ... She's standing upright in the fireplace of the great hall! That give an idea of the scale of the place. 

Here's a view into the courtyard from the tallest accessible tower - about 130 steps up the spiral staircase! The roof is gone from most of the palace, but it's easy to see where the guards and lookouts would have paced the ramparts looking out over the Glen. 

We left Linlithgow after a snack, and continued along the canal. The weather was perfect. Once again, we lucked out on the weather, and were loving every minute of it. 

At the very end of the Union Canal is the Black Hill tunnel, at 2070 feet long, and that's pretty cool.

 But what we found outside the other end of it was even cooler!

Here's the view along the very end of the Union Canal. We're at quite an elevation above the ground below. Which means that there had to be a way to get the boats from this canal down to the Clyde Canal ...

This is The Falkirk Wheel, the largest water wheel in the world. Instead of using a series of locks to raise and lower boats between the Union and Clyde canals, which would take several hours for a boat to traverse, this contraption does it in about four minutes. The picture above shows it in position to load or discharge boats at both the upper (Union) and lower (Clyde) canals.

A boat is driven into the little "tub" in Wheel, and a water tight gate closes behind it. And then ...

The wheel turns. Here it's about a third of the way down. 

And in this picture it's half-way around. Two boats fit into each of the tubs, so they can move four boats at a time in about four minutes. And, amazingly, the motor that turns the Wheel is about 8 horsepower! 

When the wheel completes cycle. Water tight gates are opened and the boats exit. Now boats are loaded, and the cycle repeats. We have a video, and will post that when we can. 

We left Falkirk late in the afternoon, and were only about half-way to Glasgow at that point. It turns out that riding along the canal paths is slow and takes a lot of effort. It's almost perfectly flat, which means we have to pedal the entire time - there are no rest breaks to coast down hills! Coupled with the stops we made and the slow-going to wind around all those bridges near Edinburgh meant that we were quite late getting to Glasgow. 

We finally arrived at our new home just south of Glasgow, in the Pollokshields neighborhood, at about 8:15 pm. It was a LOOOONG day, and our last day of the cycle tour was the second-longest in miles!

Our land-lady greeted us, gave us a tour of our new apartment, and bade us good night. You might recall that we met her at the Achininver hostel waaaay back in August. We stayed in touch with her after that, and she's letting us the apartment on the back of her house until early January. We're thrilled to be here!

We unpacked a few things... Well, let's be honest: we unpacked the glasses and whisky! We poured a slightly taller-than-normal dram, and toasted our safe arrival and the successful completion of our three-month cycle tour of Scotland's Highlands and Islands. Huzzah!

A few curious facts re our cycle tour:

- Total miles: 2211.62

- Nights camping: 34

- Hostel nights: 16

- Hotel nights: 2

- B&B nights: 1

- Nights in a museum storeroom: 1

- Ferries and Boat rides: 33

- Sunscreen usage: two wee squirts

- Midge repellent usage: two large bottles

- Fish and Chip consumption: we lost track...

- Breweries visited: 2

- Distilleries visited: 18

- Crashes: One (boB's low-speed fall-over in Stirling)

- Cases of dysentery: 1

- Bottles of chain lube: 1-3/4

- Flat tires: ZERO!

Daily Summary:

12 October- Edinburgh to Glasgow via the Union and Forth & Clyde canal cycle routes (1 & 7). Visited Linlithgow Palace, the Falkirk Wheel. Total 65.25 miles.