Home the long way

We came back today via the A7 and A72.  What a drive it was…

In two ways.  Firstly, the weather was brilliant (glad I have a decent pair of sunglasses though) and the scenery nothing less than spectacular.  I obviously couldn’t fully appreciate it as I was driving – but from my peripheral vision and J’s “oohs and ahs” I could work out it was pretty good.  Secondly, it is a real driving workout – this specific route is a bit longer round than the motorway, but it is also almost constantly demanding.  If it is not driving on fast roads with awkward bends, pushy other drivers, bicycles and tractors, it is going through the centres of unfamiliar towns with traffic arrangements which don’t appear anywhere in the standard highway code.  And roundabouts – there are 52 between Dalston and Cupar.  So all in all it is fun, but not what I would call relaxing.

We had been going to stop in Peebles for lunch, and in fact we did stop in Peebles – eventually.  We drove in looking for a car park and didn’t find one.  Came back for a second pass, circled for a bit, and found Tesco’s.  So we stopped, went to the loo, bought two sandwiches and carried on.

So instead of the fun packed day of stopping regularly as we ambled along the “Historic Route to Edinburgh” we stopped for five minutes and were home at 1pm.  All the more time to clean my house up, cook food for the men, ice my cake and dash off to the String Quartet concert at St James.