Day Five – Half Way

After such a great meal, excellent company and fantastic lodgings last night we were all feeling pretty hot to trot this morning.

How things can change during a single day…

The first 40miles went well, the weather was good and riding up around Blackburn and into Lancashire were right gorgeous I tell thee! Then we kind of messed around eating and sorting kit for probably longer than we should and we got a bit behind schedlue. That was fine though. We met up with Andy, a great friend of mine who lives near Whalley. He brought us gifts of jelly babies, bananas and cleets and pedals! Thanks Andy -hugely appreciated.

Andy then put on a team cycle top and joined us for the next leg. It’s always good to have other people cycle with us (he came on a mountain bike with fat tyres and no ‘clicky feet’ and still kept up!).

After Andy left us we were riding into the dales and it was looking spectacular and very similar to how the countryside looked on Postman Pat! There were lots of long rolling hills, but that was ok – we could handle that.

Then came the wind…. the clouds…. and the rain… lots of heavy rain…. unbelievable amounts of rain.

The ground we covered today, although beautiful (when we could see it beyond the clouds and rain) was very hilly, that meant our average speed was fairly low and by 5pm we still had 35miles to go.

Still hurting (collectively we have sore everything!), wet, tired and cold we pushed on. It’s times like this in a trip you have to dig a little bit deeper and get on with it. It’s not always easy. We finally made it to Ade (our brilliant driver) by 8.30pm. It has been a long day.

All that aside, we are now over half way (537miles done)! & I can’t quite believe we’ll be in Scotland tomorrow where apparently the only avaliable food is deep fried mars bars and haggis – I can’t wait!!!