We’re getting ready to return to France, and resume our eastward cycling journey to the Black Sea. This leg of our train odyssey will get our bikes and us to the southern edge of England. There, we’ll hang out for a few days before boarding a ferry to take us back across the English Channel to France.

We turned around, and started making our way back south. Traveling by train promised to be an adventure. We’ve never taken our bikes on European trains before, so everything was new. One last layover in Edinburg will be the end of our time in Scotland.

We’re discovering many facets of Scotland, beyond sea cliffs and castles. Of course, we’re cycling past plenty of those. But now we’ve also met Scotland’s favorite cartoon character, we’ve admired a famous St. Bernard midshipman, we’ve seen how to run a North Sea oil rig, and even learned a few words of Scots.

Cycling through the Kingdom of Fife, we circled the region’s tallest hills and its biggest lake. Castles haunted by the ghost of Mary Queen of Scots lined our path, as we negotiated our way through the hills, and back to the coast. There, in the birthplace of golf, we got stuck in a cycling sand trap at St. Andrews Links, one of the oldest golf courses in the world. The rest of the road to Dundee went more smoothly, except for that incident on the bridge over the River Eden. Let’s just say, you don’t want to get too close to a flustered swan.

It didn’t take us long to reach Scotland. As the northernmost nation that we would visit on this tour, Scotland holds a special allure. We’ve finally reached the land of bagpipes, tartans, deep blue lochs, and those adorable highland cattle.

We cycled through Dunbar, birthplace of John Muir, one of the great early leaders of the U.S. conservation movement. The John Muir Way took us most of the rest of the way to Edinburgh.