It’s 12th June. We should have been leaving
Silverton in Devon after a good breakfast, ready to tackle today’s ride to Cheddar. Instead we’re in Bristol: Ness and May are working, I’m
getting ready for a thirty-mile ride near Thornbury and Judy is nursing a
broken arm and a very sore pelvis after falling off a horse at the end of May.
Her arm will need six weeks to heal so after some discussion, the other three
of us decided to postpone the start date until September 10th. It’s
disappointing for all of us, particularly Judy, but does at least allow the
others of us more time to train (desperately needed in my case).
It also means that we will have to make a few changes to
the plan: the days will be shorter and there are no flights from Inverness to
Bristol on Wednesdays in September, so we’ll take an extra day in Scotland to
enjoy the starlit nights made more visible by lower levels of light pollution. The
only difficulties with switching accommodation dates have been with two English
Youth Hostels which were fully booked for the dates we wanted so we’re making slight
route changes. Fortunately Judy is Route Planner (very) Extraordinaire: the OS maps she's been collecting for years have well and truly proved their worth. Some people
will not now be able to join us as planned while others will have time
available and we’ll be without the support vehicles which would have been with
us for the first week.
With luck we’ll have people, dates and places sorted out
before we leave and I’ll have got the correct number of beds booked so we can
collapse in comfort at the end of each day. My current nightmare is that we'll arrive somewhere and one of us (probably me) will have to sleep in a tent miles away from the others with no phone signal to agree a rendez-vous so no way of arranging where we will have our food stops.
While we're on that subject, here's a photo to prove that, despite everything, Judy is still taking one aspect of the training very seriously. (It's not a tattoo on her arm, by the way.)
While we're on that subject, here's a photo to prove that, despite everything, Judy is still taking one aspect of the training very seriously. (It's not a tattoo on her arm, by the way.)
