Well it's been a while and for that i apologise.
We've had an exciting week or three.
11th September we met outside my flat, ready to go and full of butterflies. and fired up the Satnav in Lyndsey's car. with Kevin in tow.
Now something told me to bring Both Nokia phones with me, Call it a gut feeling if you will, but i trusted my gut more than my bike at that point. (and we'll cover that in the next post)
Remember this ride is epic for me as it's the first time I had a team with me on balls of steel and strange a feeling it was.
Also strange was meeting Lorna Bland, the chair of Surrey Sands and general great lady, who is passionate about the support group she leads and community she works with.
Eventually we set off, and boy google maps messed us about. (i'll sync with Ovi Maps next time)
Thanks to it's array of footpaths instead of roads we had a few location issues, which is shown by Endomondo, well until the battery ran out that is.
As you'll see from the map we were only a few miles from 40 when i dropped off the face of the earth, and could not log back in on phone two. Sadly The Nokia E71 actually failed me, for the first time ever. I was flabbergasted at this, my powerhouse died, but in fairness it was busy crunching A-GPS, Data and using bluetooth for the hands-free in my ear. from 6.20 AM until around midday. so it worked well, my steed! (i love my E71 and it gets treated well as a result, I've ordered a new housing for it)
The Second part of the ride was more difficult, as we had a breakdown in the first 30 miles, which rendered one of the riders out of the ride, it seems his freshly serviced bike pedal was not put back on properly damaging the pedal beyond repair, I doubt we could have pulled it back into life so with regret we left him there once weknew transport was arranged for him. Sorry Squire!
After the breakdown in the first half it hit a few of us and worry set in, well at least for me anyway. We kept going, and i started to hurt. Lipsyl to the rescue (just don't ask where i applied it) mainly my legs started to cramp up, and it affected my performance, and gosh it was not good.
a few of the others had problems too but i seemed to bear the brunt of it and i feel like i let the team down in that respect. Sorry.
We ploughed on, through little roads with tones of idiot drivers, destined for a darwin award one day, until we noticed a problem.
inconsistancies with the map had lead to us extending the mileage by 20 miles, so by the time we were near Aylesbury we had less than 10 miles to complete the 80 mile ride aggreed.
Now in 10 miles we had to work out what to do, which you'll see in the video below what we decided to do in the end, Complete the 80 miles in Aylesbury.
Now as this was an issue none of us were expecting we are gutted we never got back to Dunstable on the bikes.
But in the end of the day, we were all worn out at our new ending point of Aylesbury train station. and we even completed 86 miles, So can't be all bad.
Here is the video. highligting the short Vlogs i made while we stopped.
Now with this uploaderised onto the party.
17Th september your ALL invited to The white Swan inn, High street South, Dunstable
for our fundraising bash, lots of local buisinesses are involved in our giveaways and were even giving away a Sony Ericsson w995 with thanks to phones4u
come and join us
Even if it's just to see me go bald! (yes i'm having my head shaved!)
Paul
