Thursday 11 September: day five – St Briavels to Clun

63 miles. 5:59 hours of cycling. Average speed 10.5mph.

St Briavels breakfast happens in the wonderful castle dining room - see Pete below trying to look suitably baronial.

The run down into Monmouth was lovely, but the ten mile gradual ascent into Hereford was dispiriting. I felt tired and every pedal turn was an effort. We stopped for lunch in a cafe in the centre of Hereford and I gave myself a bit of a talking to. The beautiful rolling countryside which followed helped to lift my spirits.  

You notice much more on a bike – in particular road kill. In a car you see the big stuff in the middle of the road, on a bike you see everything – badgers, foxes, rabbits, squirrels, rats, mice, voles,  pheasants, pigeons - every few hundred yards and all smelling bad. 

I feel like I might be getting on top of the toe cramp. I was trying to drink two bidons every ten miles. I bought an extra one from Mastercarft Cycles in Hereford to help carry more liquid. The shop was family run and sold its own brand of touring bike – the Craftsman, built out of Reynolds tubing. Absolutely lovely and, in many ways, similar to my Club Tour.

Today was the best day's cycling yet with very little cramp. 

I loved the sign post outside St Weonards Post Office – John o’Groats 629, Lands End 234. The Post Mistress told me that she has four or five groups of end-to-enders in the shop every day. She was very proud that a picture of her sign had appeared on an end-to-end web site.  

Some miles after St Weonards I lay down on a grass verge in the sunshine on the edge of the A4110 and waited for Pete, who was about 20 minutes behind me. Our arrangement was that I would go ahead but wait for him at any significant change of route.  

We set off at about 5.30 to cover the last 10 miles to Clun. 

The navigation through the Shropshire hills proved really difficult. The roads were so small and the junctions so indistinct that it was really hard to know exactly where you were even with my large scale trucker maps. I got to what I thought was the right junction and waited for Pete for about 30 minutes. When he didn’t arrive I guessed that he had taken an earlier turn which I had been tempted to try.  

I pressed on up some very steep and narrow lanes and got complete lost twice and had to back-track. I arrive at Clun YHA at 7.00 thinking Pete might be ahead of me but he was not here. After nearly an hour of waiting and dark falling I started to get worried. The YHA was run by Barbara, a volunteer warden, and she suggested to one of the other guests that we drive out to try to find Pete.  

Just as we were about to leave on a search mission Pete eventually turned up, very fed up but otherwise OK. It was 8.00pm and we were too late for food at the pub so the lovely Barbara made us cheese sandwiches from her own food. 

Barbara is an 81 year-old cyclist who lives in Wales and had cycled the ten miles from the station to the YHA to start her stint as warden. She was due to travel home the next day. She and her husband cycled together all their lives, including when they had a son who they put on the back of a tandem. They had been together for nearly 60 years when he died this January. Barbara had only just got back on to her bike after his death.

Friday 12 September: day six – Clun to Runcorn

86.8 miles. 7:41 hours of cycling.  

Barbara gave us some of her bread and tea for breakfast and we set off early. The countryside was not particularly pretty, but there were some very nice villages. I was feeling really tired and although my knees and shoulders were OK and the cramp was under control I was finding the hills harder and harder to get up. It was not until sometime afterwards that it occurred to me that I had no eaten a proper meal for 24 hours and so was bound to be short of energy. 

We stopped in Shrewsbury for lunch and a passer by saw Pete’s tabard, which a friend had made and had information about what charities he was riding for, and gave him £20. We headed on off towards Runcorn, and to our surprise went through a bit of Wales again. We gave a cheer when the milometer went past 400. 

The approach to Runcorn is horrible – all huge roads – and the cycle paths are a bit forbidding. I was ahead of Pete and aimed towards where I thought the hotel was but got to a massive dual carriageway roundabout which appeared to enclose the hotel. I headed back and eventually found my way into the middle of the road system and located the hotel. Pete called me several times saying he was lost – he was asking people  the way and they were directing him as though he were in a car, which did not help much. 

I got really despondent waiting for him and called Hilary in some distress. Looking back I can now see that it was a combination of tiredness, a very long day and not having eaten enough, but at the time felt like I could not go on. Hilary was wonderfully supportive and encouraging and I calmed down a bit and went and had a shower. 

Pete arrived about an hour after me and we ate fish and chips and drank keg beer in the hotel restaurant. This was probably the lowest popint of the entire journey.

The Campanile Hotel was a bit odd – very basic, only one step up from a back packing place – but it really did exactly what we wanted. Comfortable beds, food, beer, showers. What more do tired cyclists need?

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.

Sunday 14 September: day eight – rest day

Sunday 14 September: day eight. Rest day  

It was a beautiful morning. I got bread, milk and eggs from the Post Office opposite the YHA and with the bits of butter, jam and cereal we had filched from the Campanial Hotel we had a great breakfast. 

We found a bus timetable in the YHA and saw that there was a tripper bus going through Slaidburn across the Forest of Bowland to Hawes in the Yorkshire Dales. We walked down the village to the cafe, where the bus stopped, and fell into conversation with a motorbiker who had ridden up there that morning from Bolton. 

When the bus arrive we discovered were going to be the youngest on it by at least a decade. It bowled through the lanes at a tremendous speed, stopping occasionally long enough for us to get off and have a walk around. We went past the Ribblehead viaduct and arrived in Hawes for lunch. It was full of motorcyclists – I mean really hundreds of them.  

The roads were also full of cyclists - somethimes singly, sometimes in small groups, but often in large packs of ppeople cleraly racing. In one of those we saw a dozen or so riders on top notch carbon fibre bikes and one on a Raleigh small-wheeled shoper bike. He was going like the clappers down hill but we saw him later struggling to get up an incline. He muist have been doing it for a bet - why else woudldyou put yourself through it?

We wandered around, looking in shops - which were mostly of the outdoor cltohing and equipment type -  and then had a very decent lunch in a pub. We nearly missed the only bus back as it had changed both its number and its destination, but Pete persuaded me to go and ask and it was the right one.  

We got back and I fiddled with my bike – lubricating and tightening – and then came some great news. A fellow cyclist was doing the end-to-end with a friend in a support car. They were heading for the saem place as uss teh next day and would carry our luggage. Great news! We would both be about ten pounds lighter.  

We went back to the pub, now almost empty, and had a very decent dinner with two pints of beer and were in very high spirits.

Monday 15 September: day nine – Slaidburn to Keswick

71.2 miles.6:52 hours of cycling. Average speed 10.2mph 

We had a wonderful day after a difficult start. We left Slaidburn at 8:20 after a cooked breakfast of scrambled eggs, toast, fried potatoes and tomatoes.  

It was drizzling as we started to climb and then it started to rain hard. It rained for only about half an hour but it was enough to get us properly wet. The terrain was really stark and  I climbed for about eight miles up to the Cross of Greet – a suitably bleak name for a bleak place – but when I got to the top, sitting on the post of the cattle grid gate, was a beautiful grouse which made that funny chortling noise that grouse make. It sat there for a few minutes, I stood and watched it, then it flew away. A lovely moment. 

When I tweeted about this, including moaning about cycling up through the rain and getting really wet, my friend Nigel wittily Tweeted back: "Grouse meets grouse".  

Pete joined me at the Cross of Greet and we dropped into Bentham for coffee in the Culture Cafe. There were four women chatting over coffee and cake and one of them asked us where we were going. When we explained three of the four (Anne, Mary and Heather) gave us £20 between them for our charities. Aren’t people fantastic! 

We cycled across towards the M6 and picked up the A6070, which was fairly flat and not too busy and took us to Kendal. We then had a bit of a climb to get to Windermere through some heavy traffic occasionally broken by cycle paths.
 

We road along the edge of the lake, past the Wordsworth visitor centre, to Ambleside before starting a long, gradual five mile climb to probably the best cycling yet – the edge of Thirlmere. Simply beautiful with Helvelyn towering over us. 

A few short and sharp climbs followed before we dropped into Keswick to a fantastic YHA with the beds already made! Such small things make a real difference after 70 odd miles. 

Both of us were feeling good and started to allow ourselves to think that we might actually make it. all the way to John o'Groats. 

We were reunited with our bags at Keswick - Frank and Linda (the cyclist and his support driver) were going in a different direction the next day but we would meet up with them later in the trip.

Tuesday 16 September: day ten – Keswick to Moffat

72 miles. 

We woke to a beautiful morning – the mist rising over the town and a lovely blue sky above. We had a long, slow climb out of Keswick with quite a bit of walking. Linda and Frank passed us in their car – Frank was not cycling all the way as he had a condition which sapped his energy. 

Eventually we got to quite a bleak top and then rolled down into Dalston for coffee. I could not resist tweeting the flower covered sign at the start of the village. Dalston in London, just south of my home in Stoke Newington, is about as urban as it gets. Forty yeasr ago, when I arrived in London, it was tough, harsh and threatening, now it is an interesting mix of old London, Turkish shops and restaurants and hipsters. Mtypicture got retweeted several times around Hackney with suitable comments such as:"Look how the hipsters have cleaned the place up!"

Coffee was followed by a long and rather boring ride on a quiet B road parallel to the A4(M). It was a good road but very straight and not at all interesting. Such flat riding meant we made really good time and we were elated when we crossed the Scottish border. A passing lad took our photograph – and told us he was regularly asked to do so by cyclists. 

I was a bit alarmed that the lowlands had so many hills but the cycling continued to be fairly flat and we arrived in Moffat earlier than expected.

We had thus far seen very little referendum publicity – a few Yes and No signs – and when Hilary told me on the phone that Simon Sharma was that evening broadcasting from Moffat I was mystified. We were in a hotel right in the middle and looking out of the window it was like a ghost town.

We ate huge plates of macaroni cheese and drank our regulation two pints of beer.

Wednesday 17 September: day eleven – Moffat to Dunbarton

78 miles.6:58 hours of cycling. Average speed 10.4mph 

It was a cold morning with a brisk north easterly. We had a great breakfast, after which the receptionist gave Pete £20 for our charities. We climbed steeply out of Moffat at first and then steadily with a few runs down for about 25 miles.  

We were again slogging along a B road parallel to the M74 for miles and miles. The riding surface was truly awful – something they appear to specialise in in Scotland. It was well maintained, but made out of very large chips of stone set into tarmac - the bike bounced around all over the place. At times it was almost like riding on cobbles and at one point the bike shook so much that one of my panniers fell off. 

We stopped at Blackwood for lunch – a corner ship with nowhere to sit – and then struggled through heavy traffic in Hamilton, getting a bit lost in the process. We were cycling along a pavement trying to avoid the artics when we were flagged down by a police woman. I feared a telling off but actually what she wanted was help to push a broken down car out of the traffic. We were happy to oblige.  

We eventually made it to Camberslang and picked up the cycle path along the banks of the Clyde. We bowled along with about 25 miles to go thinking that we had an easy finish. All was well into the centre of Glasgow, but after that it became difficult. We kept getting lost and eventually were forced on to the A814 towards Dunbarton. 

We ploughed on with Dunbarton feeling like it was getting further away not closer but eventually found the last cycle path of the day, which Pete managed to pick up a bit earlier than I did. 

The Abbotsford Hotel in Dunbarton is well-run and had everything we needed. 

This was the first day of the trip which felt a bit boring more than anything else. I had expected great countryside in Scotland but it had not delivered so far.