At the beginning of September, Chris set out on his birthday challenge to cycle from Land’s End in Cornwall to John O’Groats in Scotland (aka LE2JOG). This is my attempt to blog along the route.
Well, technically it isn’t day 1 as we don’t officially start till tomorrow. But I wanted to recap so far. It is the first whole day of the trip (or at least the bit that I’m here for). We started from Bedford at about 10 pm the idea being that we’d drive through the night, nap along the way and then miss the traffic to get here for the morning.
Well, that did all work but it was a little uncomfortable napping in the car. We pulled over at the services near Oxford to try and get a bit more sleep. I switched sides with Chris so had to contend with the steering wheel sharing a bed with me. That was rather uncomfy, I even tried sleeping in a kneeling position with my head on the back of the chair but after about 30 minutes of creating a mental to-do list, I gave up. I was so fed up that I decided driving might be the best option even if Chris curled up on the passenger side and slept. Then again he was curled up in the most epic position – I kinda wish that I’d have had the camera to hand. Curling up in the backseat as I’ve done on other trips wasn’t an option. The backseat was full of kit! (see here).
Our car decided to protest and around this time the clutch started playing up. We stopped at a car park near St Michael’s Mount just outside Penzance and had a look at the car. Chris called our friend, who is a mechanic to see if he could walk us through the problem and see if it was something simple that could be fixed at the side of the road or by finding a small part like a fuse or spark plug, or if it was something big. Well yes, it was something big, it was going to be a proper mechanic job.
The idea even crossed our friend’s mind that he’d drive organise a temporary car for us, drive down here with it and swap it for our car that he’d then drive back to Bedford. Woah! That’s like an 8 to 10-hour trip before you’ve even turned round to head home again. It floored me!
He said that we would need to try and get a garage to take a look at it really before driving too much further. We found a garage that might have been able to do it. However, because it was related to the clutch and it wasn’t their area of expertise. They couldn’t make an exception however the guy at the garage had a contact who could do the replacement but it was going to have to wait until Monday when he could get the parts.
Okay, so I was a little disappointed I’d got half plans to do the tourist thing before meeting Chris at our next stop for dinner and the night. Instead, I am going to be hanging around Penzance for tomorrow while the mechanic man works on the car.
So I’d like some suggestions of things to do in Penzance other than drink coffee at cute coffee shops like The Green Bean Coffee Co. and resist the urge to sing Gilbert and Sullivan songs at the top of my lungs.
For the stressful, energetic half of the trip read Chris’s posts here.
