After the excitement of beating my record distance in a day of 33.77m the day before, on the Wednesday I cycled another record of 34.00m! And on this occasion I must come clean - I did do an up-and-down-the-road of about 0.3 miles to take myself up to this point!
Anyway, back to the plot. You last read about my exploits getting to the B&B near Market Drayton. The following morning... my backside was a bit sore. My legs seemed fine (to start with) but I was a bit saddle sore before I'd even started, which was unfortunate. It was to recur most of the day, unfortunately, which made the ride even more difficult.
Fairly soon after leaving the B&B we hit some hills. In the grand scheme of things they weren't huge, but I really, really struggled up them and it dented my confidence somewhat that after a good day the previous day I might have to give up on the day before I'd even started. I just found myself having to stop frequently and it was just incredibly hard going.
To cut a long story short we managed to get past them and fortunately the road flattened a bit. We got to Wem after an hour or so - and this was my 'get out' chance, so to speak - there's a station at Wem and if I didn't feel I could cope with the rest of the ride I could have aborted and caught the train home. However, since it wasn't even noon yet I decided to keep going - after all, even if I'd walked all the rest of the way I could still have made it to Gobowen (where my train was due to leave) by walking and still have had plenty of time!
We carried on after buying some sandwiches in Wem. The next point worth mentioning was... us getting lost. Well, not so much getting lost as such, but rather not being sure which bit of the white on the map we were in! Let me explain.
Andrew had photocopied a road atlas for the route we were planning on taking - which showed all main roads, most minor roads and a few other features. Some of these features include rivers and, crucially, canals. We crossed over a canal and, looking at the map, decided to follow the towpath. This wasn't as reckless as it sounded - the canal appeared to be marked on the map, complete with a small canal arm that we saw near the bridge - and we knew that the Llangollen canal was nearby. We went over the bridge (I cycled over it, to Andrew's surprise - it was incredibly steep :-) and onto the towpath, and within a few hundred metres came across a lock. Going the 'wrong' way to that which we expected. Still, after a bit of deliberation, consultation of my GPS to give us a bearing and a bit of faffing, we picked a direction to travel in.
After a while we passed a milestone marked "Montgomery canal". Not a
problem either - we knew the Llangollen canal met up with the Montgomery
at some point, so we weren't miles out from where we thought we were!
However, after stopping for a
Anyway, the net result was that we found ourselves on completely the wrong road after leaving the canal, doubling back on ourselves and probably going about 6/7 miles out of our way. It wasn't unpleasant but I could have done without it! From there the last few miles were a slog - going into Gobowen my stamina was just failing me and I found I had to make frequent stops. Andrew was very encouraging about it all though.
As I mentioned above, when we got to Gobowen I was a few tenths of a mile short of 34 miles... so I cycled up and down the main street before stopping in a pub for a drink. (It was a bit of a rough pub to be honest; not a majorly poor one but very much a working men's pub!)
I caught an earlier train home than I was going to and arrived back at Manchester Piccadilly an hour earlier too. However, because my legs were really not up to cycling the 5 miles back home after doing 34 that day, I called up my housemate to give me a lift!
Overall, I really enjoyed the couple of days I'd spent cycling with Andrew, and apparently I fitted nicely into Andrew's week, too. I was particularly pleased to have beaten my personal best distance two days running - not exactly smashed it, but as my first experience of anything approximating 'touring' and certainly the first time I've done two journeys back to back like that, I was very pleased.
Andrew went on towards Wales after he left me, staying in Bala and climbing some 'nice' hills (as he puts it), which happened to include the highest pass in Wales... As I began the report yesterday saying... My friend Andrew is mad.