Giffnock - Newton Mearns - Neilston - Dunlop - Stewarton - A77 and home. I spent a couple of hours on my bike in the countryside south of Glasgow, in East Renfrewshire and East Ayrshire. Lots of hills! - 2000 feet of ascent in total and I could easily have added several hundred more. The reward for climbing a hill is of course the roll down the other side, for instance once you've passed the highest point of the road from
Neilston to
Dunlop - a very small town for a name found so widely. I passed through green fields, some cut for hay or silage making a patchwork of green and yellow. Bright sun and dark clouds, rain showers not far away - typical Scottish June. In the distance, hazy blue on the horizon, lay the mountains of
Arran.
I stopped a couple of times on this run to take photos.
But these are from before and after my roll through the Dunlop farmland. You don't get to share that. You weren't there. For a few minutes I thought, "wow, great photo there" over and over again but I didn't want to stop. Well, I was on a bike ride and I wanted to keep going. But even more, sheer motion was a large part of the pleasure of those moments; not just the sights but the moving through them, at some speed, under my own steam, by my own volition. If I'd stopped the sequence of those moments would have been lost, and their significance; they'd have been extracted from their place in the passage from birth to death.
