Wearing matching tops, falling down stairs and picking up Bishops

Last summer I did a Coast to Coast bike ride with some other people, and it went quite well.

We didn't follow one of the routes devised by those nice people at Sustrans.  Instead we made up our own, and it started at Walney Island and finished in Saltburn.  The whole thing was the Chief's idea, but me having ridden a bike quite a lot I soon got involved in the planning and before I knew it I had agreed to be the map man, riding in front and looking for the way.  Before we went, I did a risk assessment, and I decided that there was some, but even sitting at home in a bungalow wrapped in bubble wrap and wearing no socks carries some risk, so I decided to go for it anyway.

It didn't run entirely smoothly, but thankfully none of the mishaps ended up being terminal.  I organised a bike bus to get us over to Barrow on the Thursday night, and they sent a bus which couldn't get up hills, so it took almost as long to get to Barrow as if we rode there.

As we sat around in the pub in Barrow having curry and beer the night before the ride, I looked around at the 14 of us, many of whom don't ride bikes, and I felt very, very afraid.  I looked at Ruth and Suzanne and Graeme, and they looked at me, and then we looked at the others and I thought, this is going to be a disaster.

But it wasn't.  I did a few practice laps of Walney / Barrow before we set off because I didn't want to start the ride by taking a wrong turn into Tesco car park.  This paid off as I took us the right way, and before long we were on the coast road out of Barrow with a massive tailwind going along at 16 mph.  And I looked behind me and we were all in matching tops and it was like being in a team again, like I used to be at school, and it was great, and also worringly easy.  I'd spent months telling everyone how hard and slow cycle touring can be, but this wasn't either of those things..

The beauty of designing your own route is that you can go in a straight line if you want to, and the lack of zig zagging and the use of A and B roads instead of tiny little minor roads with massive hedges on both sides meant that we made it to our lunch stop at Cark in good time.  The sun was out and we had beer and sausage sandwiches, and it all seemed a bit too easy.  Then after lunch we went through a lovely flat bit and we could see hills but we didn't have to go up any, and the only bad bit of the whole day was getting into Kendal, as it has a one way system that doesn't work, as well as lots of roadworks.  Oh, except for Adam falling in a ditch and Clay crashing into a wall, but they were only small blunders and not full-on You've Been Framers. 

So Friday night we sat around outside the Youth Hostel having a few drinks and congratulating ourselves and then we went out for yet more curry.  After the curry I went in to watch Brazil get knocked out of the World Cup by Holland and all was right with the world, until I got a phone call to say that Graeme had been hospitalised.

He had been trying to slide down a banister which sounds fairly innocuous until you saw the banister and the concrete staircase next to it.  I've seen bobsleigh runs which look less scary.  Anyway, he did a few commando rolls down the concrete stairs and managed not to kill himself but only just.  He had an ankle like the end of Misery and a wrist to match.

So off he went to Lancaster to the hospital and the next morning over breakfast I was just saying how lucky he was not falling on his head, and just as I was saying it, Jen fell on her head.  The sound of a small thin person falling over was surprisingly loud.  I suppose when we pass out and we no longer have any muscular control, all we are is just a big bag of water, so it was quite reasonable to make a big bang.  Off she went to the hospital and hopped into the bed that Graeme had just hopped out of.

Some people seemed to be wavering at this point about going on, as things were turning into a slasher movie.  I just wanted to get out of Kendal before any more of us got picked off by someone in a Scream mask.  This was harder than it sounds because the one way system is more of a closed loop that goes round in round in circles with no exits, but eventually we did manage to get out of there.    

I even found a short cut which trimmed 3 miles off the route, but unfortunately the short cut took us up a massive hill.  There were more hills after that, and it was all taking longer than the day before so lunch had to be sandwiches and pop sitting on the floor in the car park in Sedbergh as there wasn't time for lazing around at the pub.  After that, the route became more undulating and there was a lovely stretch through Dentdale to Dent followed by a long and steep climb through and past the Dent Head Viaduct where Frances was waiting to cheer us on at the top. This was followed by a fantastic 7 mile descent into Hawes. I started off at the front on this but was overtaken by almost everyone on the way down.  Most people achieved personal best fastest times ever. I didn't, mostly because I kept the brakes on out of sheer terror.

I was flagging by Askrigg but Ruth bought me some Sprite and a pie with lots of pastry but no filling from the very friendly local shop for local people and we pressed on to Leyburn.  Once in Leyburn we checked in to our dreamy B&B (Eastfield Lodge) which had a magic shower and in only 4 minutes I felt full of life again. Kendal Youth Hostel it was not.

As a group we met up at the Golden Lion in the evening (staff and food were both great,  I had Pork Medallions) and we discussed subjects many and varied including Derek Nimmo as Mr Spock and the statue like goalkeeping of Peter Shilton. As a special magical bonus Argentina got knocked out of the World Cup, and we got to see Maradona looking fat and bemused on the sidelines, instead of out-jumping Shilton for once.

Day 3 got off to a bad start, as I couldn't find Ruth in our B&B and this held up the start.  The wind was horrendous, but thankfully behind us, and off we went again.  After Bedale I started to relax because from there I knew the way and I didn't need the map anymore.

We passed quite close to home, but didn't go there and in Stokesley we picked up a Bishop and he beat us all up some hills in casual clothing and when we got to the top of the Moors we could see the sea, and it was a beautiful sight because the sun had come out, and once I could see the sea, I knew we'd make it, and we did and I felt quite emotional at the end, because I'd found the way from Sea to Sea, and all the hospitalisations that had happened weren't because of me.

It was lovely group to ride with because nobody moaned about anything, and this was helped no end by taking a big happy Welshman along with us, who just kept marvelling at the scenery.

And apart from the hospitalisations, we were lucky.  Because we never had to ride into the wind or in the rain at all.  We had to ride up hills and some of them were big, and it was still an achievement to do it.  But it did help our morale that conditions were favourable, because I have been on cycle tours that descend into farcical river bed bike-dragging in torrential rain and this was not it.

As some famous golfer once said though, the more I practice, the luckier I get, and we deserved our bit of luck, because it was the most overprepared and well-supported Coast to Coast ride in history.  We had not only driven the route in advance, but we had spares for the spares and backup for the backup and even a spare bike, which was just as well, since John Munro turned up on a rustbucket with an orange chain and some sort of soft cheese for tyres.

We had Bob following us round in a giant van full of water and innertubes and we couldn't really go wrong, and we didn't.  And I got to be in another team photo wearing matching tops.  Which hadn't happened to me since I was at school.

Here it is:

We also managed to raise about £3600 for the Great North Air Ambulance as a result of the ride which was a great effort by everyone.

We did have to call a couple of land ambulances out during the ride, so our account wasn't entirely in credit with the ambulance people, but you can't have everything. 

On the left are the ones that finished in Saltburn.  John Munro had to go home early and a couple of the others were in the hospital.

Germany 1985 - Boris Becker, Handel's birthday and Escape to Victory - the Rematch

My first German exchange trip was in 1983 to Munich.  I got given the wrong German and then I got lost and had the German police looking for me, and then I spent two weeks photographing a girl who ended up with someone else, and I also laughed inappropriately at someone eating lemons in the cinema, but overall I still had a really great time, and so in 1985 when I got the chance to go on another German exchange, I of course said yes.

Again the format was the same.  The Germans came over to England in the Spring, and we went back there in the summer.  For some reason we were sent over to Germany on the cross channel ferry in July without a teacher to keep an eye on us, and if there's ever a situation that is bound to end in disaster, it's probably seven 17 year olds on a ferry for 4 hours with unlimited access to the duty free shop.

(The full story of having to drag my drunk school friends off the ferry can be found here)

The German leg of the trip was timed to coincide with the end of the school summer term, so we got to spend some time going to lessons in the Herschelschule in Hannover as well as hanging around in Germany being teenagers.  The best thing about school in Germany is a thing called Hitzefrei.  If it's too hot, you don't have to go to school, and they let you go about 11 in the morning.  We had Hitzefrei almost every day while we were there. 

The whole trip was amazing, although I wish I'd been kinder to my exchange partner Sebastian.  In my defence I was 17 then, and in many ways an idiot.  I was particularly rude to him regarding his taste in music, which I was unnecessarily scathing about (Judas Priest I think).  And that was coming from someone who was into Def Leppard and ELO, so I should have kept my mouth shut.  But the first few days were the best of all.

The first Sunday I was there was the Men's Wimbledon Singles Final (from Wimbledon) and against the odds the unseeded German Boris Becker was in the final.  This was in the days when the Germans were normally about as competitive as the Brits at Wimbledon.  I sat and watched the final with the entire Barth family and almost unbelievably the 17 year old Boris won.  It was extra special watching it in Germany, but it was also the first time I'd seen someone my age or younger win something big in sport.  These days there's only archeryists and crown green bowlers who are older than me in sport.

The evening following the final we were off to something called the Handelfest.  It was a massive celebration to mark the 300th Anniversary of the birth of Handel (you know the Messiah guy).  There was lots of music of his played and an enormous firework display and it was incredible, but almost as incredible was that every conversation that I overheard wasn't about Handel, it was about Boris Becker.  There were elderly Germans everywhere just unable to contain their excitement at what they'd seen.  And it was great to be there.

The other day of that trip I remember the best is the day we played football against the German army in the park.  It was so not Escape to Victory you wouldn't believe.  I'm not sure what the German army were doing in the park.  We were there on borrowed bicycles having a picnic and enjoying the evening summer sun.

Somehow we got talking to them and they challenged us to a football match, but they were so gentlemanly they agreed to play in bare feet, so as not to kick our shins to pieces with their army boots.  They also shared a crate of beer with us, which they had brought along.  I think even with the bare feet they probably won, but the result didn't really matter.

I have no idea why I felt like this, but I can remember reclining on the grass, after the barefoot football match, probably a bit drunk on beer (but not a horrible kind of drunk, just that kind of drunk where you love everybody) and I remember looking up at the sky and enjoying the warmth of the summer evening, and feeling happy enough to die.  I know that sounds bizarre.  Don't get me wrong.  I didn't want to die.  I just felt like it would be a good time to go.  I didn't see how it was possible to feel any more content than I did in that moment, and I thought it would be a good time to slip away.  Being pleasantly tipsy in a park, in a summer evening, having run around a bit playing football.  I didn't see how it could get any better.

Despite the perfect-ness of the opportunity I didn't die on my back in a park in Hannover in 1985, although I might well have done a couple of hours later.  Instead of popping off, I jumped back on my borrowed bicycle and my friends and I rode erratically around the streets and cycle paths of Hannover back to our host families.  We did some absolutely crazy cycling manoeuvres and were lucky not to arrested for being drunk in charge of bikes, but luckily there weren't any police or cars around, so we didn't get either arrested or run over.

The rest of the trip was fantastic too.  Going to school with lots of guys in denim who looked like Jim out of Taxi and lots of tall girls in three quarter length trousers (including Heike Sander, who I briefly fell in love with but only from afar, I managed to take her picture once, that was all).  Catching the underground from terminus to terminus on the spotless German underground system in hour after hour of pointless 'Bahnwanderungs'.  Having a dancing competition for hours in the local disco with Andy Ramsden.  And that isn't even mentioning the most incredible part of the trip, which was the day trip to Berlin, to see the Wall.  I'll have to write about that another time.  It was possibly the most unreal experience I've ever had.

(I did eventually go back and write about Berlin and the blog post for that can be found here)

Going to Berlin proved to be a very good reason for not dying the week before in the park, as have countless experiences since, but I hope when I do pop off, it's in as nice a place as that, surrounded by friends and after having had so much fun.