A long day ahead, with the Trough of Bowland to negotiate and a commitment to be in The Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal from 9pm onwards, and so we had decided to set off from Nigel and Sheila's by 8am.
So after the necessary photos (thanks to Nigel and Sheila for their welcome and their hospitality) we set off bang on 9am, so only an hour late from the start!
All was ok for the best part of 7 miles, until the first (and hopefully last!) crash and boy was it spectacular (not).
We'd just stopped briefly at Morrison's in Todmorden, and were setting off. Martin launched himself forward on his bike, I, immediately behind him did the same pushing on my right pedal, immediately running into his back wheel and then toppling over. I must have been doing the best part of 2mph, but with my panniers on the back I just tipped over sideways, managing to land on the ground with my left knee and right hand, but inconveniently my left shin landing on the chain wheel, which made a lovely mess!
What a great way to lose another half hour. Having tried to clean the shin in the gents, we decided it could do with a more thorough cleaning, especially as there was oil everywhere, and Martin had the bright idea of asking the store for assistance from a first aider. Tammy proceeded to very efficiently tidy things up, whilst Martin took photos to record the event for posterity.
Anyway, that was an hour and a half behind schedule and we'd still only covered 7 miles.
We successfully, this time, negotiated the exit to Morrisons and set off, again with the great weather continuing so we could enjoy the route at its best.
A jacket potatato stop at Sue's Sandwich Bar and Take-Away in Padiham (good food and best mugs of tea so far on the trip in my humble opinion) gave us the opportunity to meet Molly, a delightful German Shepherd pup, only a couple of months old:
It was then onward to the isolated beauty of the Trough of Bowland, which was a slog for me in particular (Martin observed that every afternoon I have an energy dip, before picking up steam late in the day). Anyway I followed instructions about the pace of my climb as can be seen below:
By now, unsurprisingly we were beginning to wonder if we had time to get back to Martin's house in Kendal, eat, clean ourselves up and get to the Brewery by 9pm. Martin started to think about a "Plan B" and said one possibility would be to finish cycling for the day at Kirkby Lonsdale, get a lift into Kendal and then a lift back to Kirkby Lonsdale the following morning, thereby lengthening Tuesday's ride. We decided to push on and see what progress we made and as we approached Kirkby Lonsdale we concluded that with a slight change of route, risking the main A65, and pushing on hard, timings might just work out. I obligingly got my second wind and we eventually arrived at Martin's at 8.25pm.
We managed to fit in part of our evening meal and an abbreviated clean up and dashed on to The Brewery (aided by being spotted en route by Martin's friend Simon, who was able to give us a lift, and we arrived "only" 20 minutes late.
We were delighted to see outside the crowd of friends and my in-laws, Madeline and Gary, who had all turned out to see us. We had a really enjoyable evening with them and completely forgot to take any photos of the assembled group (I remembered the following morning), but fortunately some photos were taken of us, the one below courtesy of Don Shore, who sent it to me the following day.
Two reasons for looking happy were that the 75 miles we had done that day brought our total mileage covered to precisely 600, which over 7.5 days meant we had averaged 80 miles per day, but also we were now clearly past half way and only had an estimated 55 miles to do the following day - which could mean a lie-in!
