 number 2, the fearless five, c2c, coast to coast bicycle ride June 15, 2007 Number 2 in a series of photos from the Coast to Coast bicycle ride Whitehaven to Sunderland, England Friday 8th June – Sunday 10th June 2007 Without further ado, please put your hands together and give a warm welcome to the Fearless Five. From left to right we have Kev (a school-friend's quite famous drummer's brother), Rainy (of the shaved leg fame), Darren (a bearded ex-work colleague, friend and illustrator) and me. Skip three and you get Jules (aka Winston Bumforth-whittless, a proper photographer, Northerner-hater and serial malicious blog commenter). I know it looks like the Awesome Eight, but that's due to a dodgy wind-on, hence the overlap. I quite like it all the same. I don't want to be a bore, so I'm not going to go into too much detail about the whole cycling coast to coast weekend. But I've got a few photos to post so I may as well say a few brief words. I know people write books about lesser adventures than this one, but I'll try to keep it really short. Really, really short. If it gets tedious, just turn off the computer, switch on the TV and watch Big Brother instead. Or perhaps reading this will give you the urge to get your bike out of the shed, oil the chain, pump up the tyres and get pedalling. I hope so. Thursday 7th June. Evening. Jules, Darren and myself drive up from Oxfordshire to York to stay at my parent's. Rainy and Kev are in York already. We arrange to meet at Friday 5.15am at my parent's house and drive up to Sunderland. Friday 8th June 4.45am. Get up. Eat breakfast. Drink a cup of tea. Wait for Rainy and Kev. They turn up on their bicycles at 5.30am. First sighting of Rainy's shaved legs. I presumed they would arrive in Kev's car. No way we can fit five bikes and five people in one car. Confusion. They cycle off to get Kev's car. We drive up to Sunderland (1.5hrs). Arrive at 7am and leave our cars at St. Mary's Car Park (Cost us £38.75 per car for three days. Not cheap, but 100% secure record so no worries about car being stolen). Lovely bloke from TDK Travel loads all our bikes onto a people carrier and drives us across the country to Whitehaven. Costs £32 per person. A bargain. Takes 2.5 hrs. Quite a few other people are at Whitehaven with their back-up vans. Yes, back-up vans! People to carry their luggage and tend to their every need. We realise we have no one to meet us at the top of each hill and mop our brows. We decide that they are all cheats. By the time we have our bikes back together again, packs on our backs and water bottles filled up, it's about 11am. We set off... Holga CGFN + Fujifilm Superia 400 © James Arnold 2007 Comment (10) | Permalink |
