I met up with Gillian this morning and she dried some things in the campsite with some laundry tokens I had left over. We set off again following the Sustrans route, stopping off in Gatehouse of Fleet for food. A bargain all day breakfast and an expensive hot chocolate.
From Gatehouse of fleet, we decided in frustration with the Sustrans route to follow the A75 to Newton Stewart. This road was a little bit hairy at times but we made fantastic progress, and came off this road at Creetown. We saw a lovely old looking Smithy shop with a young female blacksmith shoeing a horse as we cycled by. I wanted to stop and ask about getting my cycle racks fixed but we didn't want to hang around too long until the horse was fully shoed, so we carried along our way.
We came across an atrocious section of the Sustrans route involving a very steep incline to get on to an old railway line path, and then a very steep downhill section further on. This was a really unuseable section of route, and what I am coming to think of as a typical Sustrans feature. I really don't want to criticise the efforts of this organisation as they have such good intentions, and are doing so much for cycling. However, we were actually trying to get somewhere on our bikes and the effort and time involved in pushing fully laden bikes up this type of terrain is ridiculous.
In Newton Stewart I met Jan from The Netherlands at the campsite who also had a Bob Trailer. All three of us met up in the evening at the Bruce Inn for a couple of drinks. My cycle computer was again giving incorrect readings so the mileage today, taking the reading from the Sustrans route which we did not fully follow was 44 miles. The campsite was £6.
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