I have updated the route to better reflect where we will be going. We added a small detour on day one to ride past the actual Watership Down of Richard Adam's childhood. Check out the final route here. 359 miles!
The last day was the toughest by far. We set off from Truro in the morning in chilly weather and heavy winds. We had cut down the miles due to timing and exhaustion. We also wanted to avoid major roads. We had a plan to meet for lunch around 1pm. We immediately encountered a path that was narrow, covered in mud and loose stones and overgrown with bushes. There was no way we would be able to cycle on it so we walked our bikes for miles. Many, many miles. On the plus side, we witnessed some of the most spectacular views of our entire trip, at one point walking down a mine trail with an old mine shaft on either side of us. Slowly. We were averaging 4 miles an hour. Twenty miles of what should have been cycling took us four hours. That's two laps around White Rock Lake and that takes us an hour and 15 minutes. Once we were off the muddy paths were had to climb hills all afternoon and because of the weather conditions we couldn't go downhill very fast. At the bottom of o...
Matt and Paula Wildash are giving up their vacation time to drive around England in a rental van (named Snail 1) big enough to hold 6 people, 2 bike cases, luggage and enough Walker’s Crisps to start another potato famine. Matt and his brother Nick lived next door to our grandparents growing up. Nick is roughly the same age as our eldest brother Simon and Matt is the same age as Daniel. For me, I had a stuffed panda named Kevin. My lack of a human, similarly aged counterpart living next door left me with the choice of Leia or Chewbacca when we were role-playing Star Wars. It also contributed our routine hide and seek games - where everyone else would piss off home while I hid under a tree for 3 hours - crying. Ah, memories. That being said, I once fell into a mass of stinging nettles and Matt was very helpful and consoling. Daniel not so much. We have known the Wildashes almost as long as we’ve known our own family and over the years they have ...
Started the day at an NHS clinic. The nurse told me that I probably have a slight tear in the meniscus ligament in my left knee. She wasn't encouraging about us cycling 150 more miles but told me that I should listen to my body and if it tells me to quit then I should. (Actually she started with "Nope, you aren't doing that.") She also suggested I put a bag of frozen peas on my knee. Ah, the marvels of modern medicine. Needless to say the visit to a clinic gave us a later start than we've had the last two days. So far we have failed to do the full miles we planned. Soreness, injury, big hills and rough terrain have delayed us every day and today was no exception.We started off around 11:30AM. Heavy hill work today. We climbed over a thousand feet in elevation and dropped down almost as much. The views were pretty spectacular, only slightly marred by having to listen to Joe Satriani. The hill climbs were trying though. Several hills had to be walked up w...
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