June 29, 2025
Kirkcaldy to St. Andrews
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We are riding to St. Andrews today where we will meet up with a wing of Dave’s family. His grandniece is graduating from St. Andrews. We are not actually going to the graduation ceremony, as it’s next week (and tickets are limited) but we are catching up with a bunch of family for a couple of nights to celebrate. We calculated last night at dinner we hadn’t seen most of these folks since a 2022 family wedding. Plus, I am looking forward to doing some activities that someone else arranged. Christl (married to Dave's nephew Eric) is a travel planner by profession so she is very organized (and fun) as is her daughter Electa (the graduate).
Breakfast this morning was in line with last nights dinner: the choice was porridge or the full Scottish, which in this case came with canned tomotoes….I am such a snob.
We set off at 10:30 to sunny (for Scotland anyway) weather so we were in cycling shorts only - a rare occurrence. It was a wonderful day, again on Cycle Route 76. There were lovely flowers on the trail.
4 km into the day we came to a set of stairs that crossed the highway (A92). This had been identified in the planning as an obstacle by Komoot. There was no easy alternative so we just decided to go for it. In fact the Scottish transportation planners did a great job managing the stairs for bikes. The stairs were spread out and there was a usable ramp to push the bikes up. Walk assist is very valuable in these circumstances.
We rode 30 km before stopping for lunch at the Village Cafe in Ceres where we split a BLT for lunch. It was almost empty when we walked in, and 10 minutes later it was full, so we had good timing.
The rest of the ride was up a nice climb and the scenery from the ridge was stunning. The countryside looked well groomed and affluent.
We had booked into a condo I found on booking.com. There were not many options and St. Andrews was very expensive as it was graduation week. So, we had low expectations for the condo which were magnified when we learned from looking at google maps that it is student housing during the year. We had a hard time finding it. It’s a huge building and we were directed initially to the back of the facility, and then there were stairs to reach the front, etc. Ten minutes later we finally found reception.
Things have changed a bit since we were in college, accommodations being one of them. The facility is privately owned and is rented out to tourists in the summer season, marketing itself specifically to golfers as there are 40 courses in and around St Andrews. It's new and and an order of magnitude higher in quality than what we endured in our college years. Our room turned out to be a long, narrow suite, with a kitchen (two burners, mini fridge, small bathroom (shower only), a three-quarters size bed and a small living area with large tv. It’s a bit claustrophobic for two people. Two big positives: It had ac and it is very new. It felt like camping out in a small mobile home. It reminded Dave and me of the time we stayed in a “container hotel” in Valparaiso on our honeymoon.
We were due to meet our family at BrewDog in downtown St. Andrews. There we met the Clark Clan and some of the siblings of our sister in law Christl. They are from Wisconsin and Portland so of course we had a lot of fun meeting them and catching up. Eric and Christl have two daughters (our grand nieces) Electa and Bodil and they are fun, interesting young women.
Today's ride: 50 km (31 miles)
Total: 2,098 km (1,303 miles)
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