Callander to Balloch

We left Callander this morning with hardly a cloud in the sky - tshirts on, sunscreen slathered - and the day stayed that way. (In fact, as I write this, we are wondering exactly how we'll manage to sleep tonight.) This was a nice change from cloudy, and would have been made a whole lot nicer had we been doing the ride a few years ago - before large sections of the countryside got logged.

The first part of our route took us past two lochs:



It's not this one, because there were no good spots for a picture, but one of them was called Loch Drunkie....

Much of the day was off-road, which was mostly good except for a couple of steep gravelly sections. Also, we saw a deer! (Actually James saw two - I was too busy negotiating gravel to see the second.) James forgot to mention that seeing a deer was one of the highlights of our walk up to Bracklinn Falls, yesterday. I've never seen deer in the wild before. Now, to find a hedgehog... and a red squirrel.

We also went over a couple of bridges:



Things Alex does not like

We got into Balloch mid-afternoon, parched and desperately in need of a cool shower. Having recovered some semblance of humanity, we walked into the town proper, via Balloch Castle and Loch Lomond. James was utterly dismissive of the castle - built in 1808 ("pft! modern!" he says; that's supposed to be my line!) - seems I've created an historical snob (and this is while he's still in therapy because I suggested that not all the ruins we'd seen were exactly, erm, as ruined as they might have been...). The Loch is indeed impressive; it's one of the biggest, after all. There were lots of kids swimming, and a few less-than-sensible people out on jet-skis mighty close to the swimmers. How can there be jetskis on Loch Lomond??

Also? While James has been getting into the Harry Potter love (and therefore has to retroactively take back the nasty things he said about my month-or-so long HP obsession, before we left), I've been reading a book that made him terribly depressed for a good few days: Six Degrees, with a chapter looking at predictions of consequences for 1C global rise in temperature... 2C global rise in temperature... etc. It's enough to send me back to science fiction.