Cycling the Length of Britain - It's like a Saga Holiday but without the bus

Last September I cycled from Land's End to John o' Groats.  The longer ago I did it, the more unreal it seems.  As I recall, I didn't enjoy it much at the time, at least I didn't enjoy the cycling part.  It was more of a war of attrition 'don't waste time turning your neck to look at things at the side of the road' mile-crunching how-far-till-the-next-hotel-a-thon.  I often think it's one of those things where it's more about the satisfaction of having done it, than it is about the actual doing.

I wrote about the trip here.

And this is the bunch of total strangers I did it with...

I have to say though, the parts aside from the cycling were great, helped no end by the lovely group of fellow cyclists who I met on the trip, none of whom I knew in advance.  Many of them were decades older than me, but they were all deceptively young looking and generally much fitter and faster cyclists than I was.  Some of them were English but there were also Canadians and Americans as well as a Frenchman, a Malaysian, someone from Scotland, and worst of all some people from Lancashire... That last line is meant to be a joke...sort of.

Actually Land's End to John o' Groats was pretty easy.  I just followed this massive purple line

As well as being thrown together for 17 or 18 days with 17 or 18 people I'd never met, I also got randomly allocated a room-mate who I'd never met as well.  I could have paid extra to have a single room, but I was prepared to play twin room roulette in order to save a bit of money.  I got lucky.  I got paired with Erwan, a man who I assumed was from his name was Welsh but who turned out to be Malaysian.  He was a 5th year medical student at the time, and he wasn't just riding with us, he was studying us as well.  As part of some research he was doing into what happens to old people on long and exhausting cycle trips where they eat mountains of fat and fall off their bikes into nettles and crash into walls.  He must have thought he'd signed up for a Saga Holiday.  I ended up sharing a room with him because I was the next youngest in age, even though I was twice as old as him.

Hey! Look what I won in the room-mate Lottery

Throughout the trip Erwan would have to weigh us all and pinch bits of us with callipers and measure the circumference of parts of us with a tape measure.  All in the name of research.  Most people lost fat during the trip, I was the anomaly.  I put fat on.  This can easily be explained by the number of apple pies, Victoria Sponges, scones, cooked breakfasts, Boost bars, biscuits and other 5 meals a day that I ate.  I didn't eat because I was hungry.  It was 'just in case' eating.  I ate out of fear, fear of running out of energy.  I tried and failed to eat a range of energy bars too, but they were either like the stuff you hang in a budgie cage, too dry to swallow, or they were so chewy you couldn't detach the part you were trying to eat, it would envelope you like a lasso as you tried to bite a bit off.

Hey! This apple pie isn't fattening enough.  Can I please have a teapot full of double cream to pour over it?

I'd like to think that before the trip I made an honest assessment of my strengths and weaknesses.  Strengths: strong legs and ability to ride a bike.  Weaknesses: No sense of direction or ability to read maps and with a brain that has a tendency to go to scrambled eggs when I'm tired.  For me the planning of the trip alone would have been a headache I didn't need, so I paid Chris Ellison of CTC Holidays to take all the stress out of the equation.  And for me it worked.  It was great value for money too.

Thanks to Chris I made it to John o' Groats.  Without his help I would probably have gone the wrong way and ridden into the sea somewhere in Cornwall

Some people I know who've done the journey before me preferred to slog it out solo, getting up at 5 in the morning and doing 120 miles a day and carrying their own luggage and living on nuts and berries, but not me.  I did it the easiest way possible and still I mostly didn't enjoy it.

I may have fallen out of love with cycling, but I'm still capable of eating 7 meals a day

Anyway, last week I went to meet up with Erwan again, to do a reunion bike ride.  He lives in Aberdeen and I live in Wakefield, so we decided to meet on the Isle of Arran.

I've cycled round the island once before but it didn't go too well.  Amongst other things I got slightly electrocuted.  I've been told by people who are very keen on semantics that I didn't get electrocuted at all, as this often results in death or at the very least serious injury, and all I got was a small electric shock.  But electrocuted sounds better.

When I was 7 I wrote a story called 'Martian Maroons' about some people who were marooned on Mars, and my teacher crossed out the title and called it 'Marooned on Mars' and I went mental.  She said there was no such thing as a Maroon.  I said yes there is, it's someone who's been marooned, and I also told her 'Marooned on Mars' was a shit title that even a 7 year old would be embarrassed by.  Actually I made the last part up, but I was just making the point that language isn't just about meaning, it's also about creativity and how things sound, and that's why I love certain words and phrases.  Because they sound good.  And although I always try to write with the truth, sometimes I'll just pick a word or phrase because I like how it sounds.  This is not a test, I'm doing this for fun!  We only learn to read and write when we're 5 and up till then language is entirely aural anyway.  If language wasn't about sound Peter Kay would never be able to make a living.  Repeating 'Garlic Bread' over and over is only funny because he's from Bolton.  If he sounded like the Queen he wouldn't have an act.  But I digress....

Which way are we going again?

The Isle of Arran has a road round the outside and to do a full circuit of the island is 56 miles.  I thought this was a good distance to do with Erwan as it wasn't far off the length of one of our Lejog days, it's just that it's going round in circles rather than in a line.

No purple line this time!  We followed this red one instead

There's a saying that you can't jump into the same river twice.  I don't think you can ride round the same island twice either.  The wind was blowing in the opposite direction to last time I did it, and all the bits that were hard last time were easy, and all the bits that were easy last time were hard.

Choice is Hell

On a long day's bike ride, it's tiring to have to think, to have to make choices.  Even choices about where to stop and what to eat.  On the trip we did last September, all choices were taken care of by Chris.  A Garmin on your handlebars with a little purple line to show you the way, a pack of notes in your pocket with all the food stops on, so you knew where you were stopping and when.

In September I even started ordering the same thing in every cafe, so I wouldn't have to waste time choosing.

Meeting Erwan this week, having to think for ourselves, even choosing when to stop and what to eat was a pain.  Also, our day of riding round Arran was less mileage than almost any day on the Lejog, but yet we still managed to be out until nearly 7.  Most days on Lejog we were finished and eating biscuits by 5.

Some of the extra time it took was because we had no-one to give us the hurry-up.  We spent quite a bit of time setting up Erwan's tripod to take some pictures of us with Pladda and Ailsa Craig in the background.  Not sure Chris would have approved.  With hindsight it's probably a good thing he was keeping an eye on the time for us every day on Lejog, otherwise we could have had some very late nights.

Is this a good enough place for this scenic shot or do we need to move the tripod 100 metres to the left?

Erwan and I finished our reunion ride with some Pot Noodles.  Erwan cracked an egg into his after amazingly dropping all 6 eggs on the floor without breaking any of them.  And then we went out for some unnecessary burgers...

These binoculars are rubbish - I can't see a thing....

Earlier in the day I'd had some fruit and yoghurt, and coffee.  And a full Scottish, and some Whisky cake at Lochranza Distillery, and some cullen skink and chips at the Lagg Hotel, and half a Snickers, and a Picnic and a Boost bar and a big bag of Cheese and Onion McCoys.  And so after my burger I laid down on my bed with a full stomach and aching legs and passed out.... Just like last year.

This time I was in a slow group of One...

It was strange for the two of us to be together, but without the rest of the group from last year.  And it made me think of them all.

When I look back now at that picture of us all at Land's End, those people who hardly knew each other, I think about what we went through together, and how much we'd bonded by the time we reached John o' Groats.

Here's a picture Ray took at JoG.  Which came out better than the one taken by the man there who supposedly takes pictures for a living

We didn't all have the same stories, we didn't all ride together, but we were riding all those same roads on the same days, and eating all those meals at the same hotels.  Very rarely on the actual ride last year did I ride with Erwan, but so often in the evenings we would stay up late wasting valuable sleep time laughing about our very different days.

And so last week, despite the absence of everyone else, Erwan and I once again sat up remembering the funny bits of our trip.  In the absence of being able to reassemble the whole gang again from Canada and America and various parts of the UK, this was good enough.

This time we only spent one day riding a bike, and eating ourselves stupid and then lying around our twin bedroom hardly able to move with leg knack, but it made us reflect on how amazing it was that  we managed to do this for 17 days in a row last year.  This year one day in a row seemed enough.

Abington Motorway Service Station - quite far down the list of best hotels on the trip

On Wednesday on my journey back from Arran, just before I got stuck in a massive traffic jam, I stopped at the services at Abington in Scotland.  Which gave me some further reminiscences.  And not good ones.  Abington I think was the worst day and night of Lejog.  We got the World's worst custard at the Abington Hotel and Cathy got offered an omelette as the veggie option and then the next day we had to take laminated tickets into the motorway service station to get our breakfasts.  Sitting in the traffic for several hours on the M74 was only marginally worse than cycling up National Cycle Route 74 in the opposite direction last year, when the surface was so bad the whole day that all my teeth nearly fell out.

Here's Erwan and me on the cobbles

But if that evoked a bad memory, I had some much better ones on Sunday when I went to Haworth, and I spent some more time on the cobbled street that I had been in such a rush to ride up and not look at in September last year.

Chris is just about to break it to us that we have to cycle over some massive hills before we can go to bed

On that occasion all I saw were a few cobbles and the outside of Emma's Cafe.

Better get a move on!  The clock is running!

It was lovely to go back there this Sunday with Joy and spend a very different day eating cakes and pancakes from different cafes, and visiting the Bronte Parsonage Museum, where I saw the actual desk where the Bronte sisters wrote their novels...

This time I wasn't in such a rush to get up those cobbles

We also went on an unexpected steam train ride to Oxenhope and back, which was great except the steam engine almost shattered my eardrums by blowing out some steam right next to my head.

Who knew that Haworth had steam trains?

It makes you realise how many places you miss when you go on a trip where the point is just to get to the end.  So many lovely places we stopped in only for long enough to eat a toasted sandwich, like Haworth or Ludlow or Ironbridge.  And so many other places we didn't stop in at all, and so I don't even remember their names.  Probably hundreds of places that you could easily spend a week's holiday in each.  But on Lejog you don't get the opportunity to immerse yourself fully in the places you visit, you have to keep moving and you can't hold on to things.  All you get are snapshots.  It's a metaphor for life!    

But sometimes in life you do get the chance to go back, and take a bit more time, and see what you missed and I did this week.  

And since last year's trip, as well as Haworth and Abington, I've been to Huddersfield and Carlisle and some other places that crossed the route we did last year, and each time I'm glad.  Glad that I did it, but also a bit glad that I'm not in the middle of doing it all again.