Saturday 13 September: day seven – Runcorn to Slaidburn

65 miles.6:47 hours of cycling. Average speed 6.1mph 

This was the day I had not been looking forward to – cycling up between Manchester and Liverpool. Barry Evans from the Manchester branch of Equity had wanted to cycle with us, but I put him off. I didn’t know how I would be after my bad day on Friday and Pete was still limping very badly. It felt like a day on which we just had to get or heads down and get through.

We set off on the canal bank, which was right next to the hotel, thinking it was the Manchester Ship Canal. Luckily we discovered after a few miles that it wasn’t and were able to get back on to our track.  

It was a scrappy day, up through Warrington, Leigh and Bolton, with tricky navigation, but it was not as urbanised as I had imagined and the traffic was not too bad. We cycled up on to the moor above Bolton and sat in the sun and ate our sandwich lunch which we had bought at a Sainsbury’s  in Leigh.

I tweeted that we were up above Bolton and my friend Elspeth Facebooked “How the blinking heck did you get to Bolton?”. I told her we did it the Mungo Gerry way – "Round, round wheels, wheels go round. Down up pedals, down up down". The words were in my head thanks to Louise Grainger at my work place who had wished me luck with them. It has a great rhythm to cycle to and I was singing it to myself for most of the way. 

We dropped down off the moor and worked our way through Blackburn and then had a 20 mile climb through the Forest of Bowland finishing with some really sharp climbing into Slaidburn. 

I think that we had both been holding ourselves together to get this far for our first rest day. Imagine our disappointment when the only pub in the village said that they were fully booked and could not even do us bar food. They were in the midele of some sort of hunting, shooting and fishing festival and the pub was heaving with people in that dinstictive "country wear" thta appears ot be required before you go offf and kill something for pleasure.

We slunk back to the YHA where they had a small food store. We ate a very unappetising meal of vegetable soup and tinned potatoes and then went back to the pub for beer and crisps. I was so hungry that on this day I did in fact eat two Snickers bars before going to bed.