Scotland North Coast 500 Run

[Keethos 842]

When Faith, Mike, Chris and Rich decided to do a Scotland trip, I was gutted I couldn't join them earlier this year. Shortly after, another friend of mine said that him and his mates were going to do something similar, once again I was unable to attend, but then when another group of mates said that they were going to this trip during the same week I had already booked off for a wedding up north, this worked out beautifully.

A massive thanks to my friends Paul and Lee for inviting me to join them in their Scotland North Coast 500 run, Paul in his amazing BMW 1M Coupe and Lee in his awesome pocket rocket Ford Fiesta ST. The weather was on and off but it always held out when we were on the nice fast and twisty roads.

We started off in Leamington Spa and drove up in convoy up to Dumbarton on the Sunday. The following morning we headed up to Inverness but we took a quick detour around to Stronachlachar Pier, which took a while due to the very tight and bumpy one track lanes but the views were worth it, we then made the mistake of driving over to the opposite side to Inversnaid, the roads were still tight and there wasn't a lot to see when we got there (literally just turned around and headed back) but it was nice to drive along side the loch. We then continued up towards Inverness while coming across some awesomely tight and twisty roads along the way, some up hill hair pins to boot. We even stopped part way through at the Dalwhinnie Distillery for a quick tour which was interesting. The rest of the way was just single to dual carriageways.
The next day we ventured from Inverness to Ullapool via the north coast of Scotland, this time round it was a combination of single track lanes with plenty of over taking areas and fast sweeping corners, a much faster pace that then day before but it was still a good 7 hour journey. We stopped part way through at John O'Groats for a spot of lunch and pics before we carried on. We made another stop later on so I could swap over my SD cards from my dash cams while giving Paul some well deserved rest after a sleepless night from some sort of food poisoning the night before.....haggis stuffed chicken anyone? I also discovered a stowaway when we stopped, luckily the car had already dealt with it and decided to eat it, I was warned about the sheep on the road but luckily none of them were feeling suicidal....sadly I couldn't say the same about the birds, there was loads of them flying low down past the front of my car for some reason....luckily the poor one in the picture didn't cause any damage to the car.

The next day was an even longer day, we continued around the coast driving from Ullapool via Applecross, then cutting across back to Inverness and then down pass Loch Ness past For Williams before arriving back in Dumbarton. The reason for the major detour was even before we began the journey, we knew petrol could be a problem, being religious users of Shell V-Power we had to tactically choose out routes based on where the Shell garages were....however once you went past Inverness, you were crap out of luck of Shell garages so we had to make do with any petrol station with super unleaded.....sadly there wasn't that many around either, so after leaving Ullapool, we wouldn't have been able to make it to Dumbarton so we had to take a detour back to Inverness to refuel in order to make it back to Dumbarton. This meant going down the Applecross pass which in pictures looks amazing, steep twisty turns and hair pins...but in reality it was a nightmare, proper steep drops with very very narrow roads. We had to creep down and constantly stop in very small overtaking spots....and with old geezers not knowing how big their cars were, we got into a pickle at one point....wouldn't want to tackle that again....just glad we were doing down and not up it. The rest of the roads were awesome, during the last stretch, we went high up into the mountains where there was a lot of mist, really moody atmospheric settings with really fast of open roads.....very fast.

On the last day (Thursday), we had a bit of a lie in before the long journey home, however for myself, it was just another journey to be had, I had to make my way down to Halifax for my mates wedding so rather than taking the boring motorway down, I departed from the convoy down near Carisle to tackle some of the back roads through the lake district, some nice roads and pretty scenery there but not really an idea location for driving enthusiasts as most of the roads were 40mph for no apparent reason and the roads were just full of really slow ass drivers. Managed to find a couple of nice twisty roads but not a lot.

All in all a very long and exhausting week, each night I was always out cold, one night I tried to get comfy in bed first before I turned everything off to go to sleep however as soon as my head hit the pillow I was out cold, the next night, after having a shower, I sat down, had a look at my phone, closed my eyes and the next time I opened them again, it was 2:30 in the morning.....I was still sat there stark naked. The roads were awesome but some of it did drag on a bit, think we needed to take more breaks or visit more set locations, to my understanding, the North Coast 500 should normally be done over 4-5 days, we did it in 3 so that's pretty impressive....but very tiring. I'd definitely be up for something like this again, I'm sure there are more awesome roads to be discovered but at the same time, bring on some Euro trips!  I've got about 300GB of footage to sieve through (footage from my front dash cam as well as nabbing my sister's dash cam to point backwards) so videos to follow at some point but in the mean time, here are some pics I tool.

 

[Keethos 842]

I've been slacking on the video front I know (sorry, but sourcing a new PC to handle it all) but my mate Lee Williams has been on it and made an awesome trailer followed by a day 1 & 2 vlog of our North Coast 500 Scotland trip....."arh sorry Keith".....amazing.  Enjoy.

 

 

I've finally got a new PC so will be looking at compiling some videos....but I've got soooooo much footage to go through

[Keethos 842]

Here's another video from my friend Lee for day 2:

 

And I've FINALLY started on my videos so here's the first one:

However this was the easy one, the others will take a lil longer as there's a lot more footage and a lot more to see so it might take me a while to sift through them all and then compile something from it.