Glasgow-Balloch-Drymen Route
Since my car was badly vandalised last night, I decided to go for another bike ride after first driving the car to Springburn Autoglass to leave it to have 3 windows replaced, with bleeding hands after trying to clear some glass from the car.
For my bike ride, I headed out along the filthy broken glass strewn cyclepath past Scotstoun and Yoker to Clydebank. After Dalmuir things thankfully improve with a more scenic section of canal leading to Bowling. With perfect timing, my rear mudguard spontaneously fell off just before Magic Cycles, so blagged a locking nut from the same chap who sold me a bell yesterday, and continued cheered on by one small bit of good luck, and the weather steadily improving.
After an hour and a half I was at the end of the cyclepath in Balloch, but had already decided to continue towards Balmaha, with the idea of climbing Conic Hill.
When I reached Drymen, I stopped briefly to re-fuel on Gatorade and Rice Krispies marshmallow square and then headed on towards Balmaha. However it was now after 4pm, and I knew that carrying my bike over Conic Hill in deep snow would take a while, so I cut off at Milton of Buchanan into the Garadhban Forest, which was fun to start with but then became impossible to cycle. So I was reduced to walking pace with time ticking on.
As soon as I hit the Gartmore road I gave up with the West Highland Way and instead took the road back down to Drymen and since it was almost 5pm and I had no lights, I knew I would have to follow the main road back to Glasgow, which is not very pleasant. My original plan had been to stay on the West Highland Way, but this would have been far too slow, given that it gets dark just after 6pm.
So, other than a brief stop at the Anniesland chip shop, I had a pretty uneventful return journey, but was quite tired after being out for 4½ hours.
