Day one

I had my final ever biology exam today. :D. I just wish I felt like that. In fact this evening feels a bit dead, despite everything: the wonderful weather we're having; the swim I went for this evening; the promise that soon exams will be over. It doesn't feel like it should. Maybe it's because I found the exam more difficult than I expected, or my girlfriend's blowing me off to play computer games this weekend, who knows.

Anyway as promised here is the beginning of the story of my great adventure, day one of my ride.

So I set off up the hill after the others. Most of them had left about 5 minutes before, with only John waiting for me to get my helmet, gloves and, of course, shades on. I managed to beat John up the first hill, which would have felt impressive if he wasn't in his fifties. I powered on nevertheless and caught up with a couple of the others at the next stop point, 5 miles down the road. There I pulled over for a drink as John went straight past, enjoying the downhill that the minibus had decided to stop halfway down, I wish they'd stopped at the top of hills more often.

Only David, the vicar from St Cleopas, the church I was helping raise money for, was with me when I left the first stop. He was struggling though, after a hard morning's ride that I missed, and told me to go on ahead to make sure I kept up with the others as he suspected he would be ending the day with a ride in the minibus. I wasn't too keen on the idea but didn't want to be left behind or hold the others up on the first day so pressed on. David kept up for a while but by the next stop was a few minutes behind me.

At the next stop I caught Gary and John as they were recovering from the huge hill we'd just been over. Only Tom remained out of my sight now, somewhere miles down the road. Pulling back onto the road I was just behind Gary but decided to overtake him at the top of yet another hill and raced down ahead in search of Tom.

I was feeling pretty good at this stage, my legs were hurting with the effort but nothing I hadn't expected and my fears of not being able to keep pace had been dispached, even if I did wonder if I could keep it up after my advantage of being 30 miles fresher wore off.

Over the next few hills the road was clear ahead of me, I never lost sight of Gary and John behind me for more than 30 seconds after each peak, but I kept a good distance and pace up. It must have been another 5 or so miles down the road before I first caught sight of Tom's fluorescent jersey just disappearing over yet another hill crest. I kept hammering on and managed to keep about a minute and a half behind him, which is actually quite a long distance on a bike, until he stopped to make sure we all went the right direction.

As you can probably tell up to this point I'd been going for the competitive angle to keep myself going, it was quite entertaining and kept my mind occupied, which is kind of necessary when all your body is doing is pushing your feet round in circles. I really don't know why I enjoy cycling so much thinking about it, I guess it's not so much about what you're doing but more what's around you that makes it what it is. Without the air rushing past, and the scenery, I guess it'd be actually quite boring. No wonder I don't like exercise bikes.

Anyway, enough abstract ranting, after Tom stopped to point us in the right direction we stuck together, minus David who was being accompanied by the minibus. So my competitive streak had to subside and I settled down into a rhythm with the others. Soon the hills flattened out as well as we headed into the Eden valley. That's not some crazy metaphor for how beautiful it was or anything, it was just the valley of the River Eden. We stopped for a while and stood on one of the few remaining parts of Hadrian's wall. John lay down which was a mistake. It took him 5 minutes to get up again.

We were waiting for the minubus but it was still a few miles back encouraging David along so we headed down to the river and across to the next town. It sounds a lot easier than it was. Hadrian's wall is quite high in parts and the River Eden is pretty low so heading down the hill was great fun, except for the blind corners at 30 odd miles an hour which were an ickle bit scary, but the hill on the other side was the biggest and steepest we'd had all day. We made it though, eventually, and stopped in the centre of Brampton for the bus to arrive.

It had been a beautiful afternoon but the clouds were starting to gather as the minibus pulled up, informing us that David was still more than 5 miles behind us and we should just go on and supplying us with sandwiches and drinks. We carried on down towards the church we were staying at, just a few miles down the A69, but of course there was time for one last detour, up a hill. For the rest of the weekend we would spend quite a lot of time finding ways around the A roads but this was the first one we'd come across today. We decided to head up through the village of Hayton so that we weren't holding up the lorries.

We reached a turning for Hayton quite quickly, only a mile down the road, unfortunately it was one to early and we took it anyway. It took us up over another hill and down into Hayton. We had only been 2 miles away from the end of the days ride, this pushed it up to 4 or 5 but we reached it eventually, by which time I just wanted to collapse.

We unloaded the minibus and David turned up about 20 minutes later, having made some serious ground up while we were stopped in Brampton. The minibus had gone looking for him, but had gone the wrong way and returned 10 minutes after his arrival. We put the lasagne that we had been given for tea in the oven then the curate of the church we were staying in turned up and offered us showers at his place. These were galdly accepted and an hour later after all 5 cyclists and the 2 drivers had had a shower we returned to a beautifully cooked lasange with boiled potatoes and garlic bread.

After tea we unpacked our blow-up beds of various sizes: from John's huge double mattress that was about 2 foot high and about 6 foot wide to Tom's blow up roll matt that was about an inch deep, then pumped them up using Graham's (one of the drivers) electric pump, well Tom blew his up. We then had a worryingly competitive game of Uno, Tom got really into it, and I taught the oldies what decent music sounded like before we all curled up into our beds around half past ten. That was the quickest I've fallen asleep in years, despite Graham's snoring.