Day 3

Monday

What better way to spend one’s August bank holiday than cycling through some of the more deprived parts of Lancashire? That’s what we thought and duly indulged this fetish by cycling from Golborne north through Preston onto Lancaster and then into the Lake District. Bliss.

The first session was going very badly. John’s bike was playing up in a big way and no sooner were we fixing it than it was breaking again. Surely this beautiful piece of machinery that cost nearly £100 wasn’t going to prove the weak link in the chain? Of course it was. After 15 miles it was knackered. Just like us, but for the bike it was permanent. John switched onto Matt’s bike and we set off to try to catch up some time. We passed Preston and headed on towards Lancaster when we saw a “Buy a Bike” store. Despite disguising their retail intentions incredibly well with that vague name, they in fact sold bikes and happily sold one to John. Having wasted loads of time by now, we then made great pace after this. Lancaster came and went, and then we started the haul up to Kendal.

This is where the hills started. We made great pace through the flatter parts of Lancashire but as we got closer to Kendal we really started the climbing. There was one particularly painful two mile climb on the A591 which really separated the men from the boys. We lost sight of the men after the first 50 yards of this climb and completed the rest in a cloud of sweat and swearing, clearly being the boys in that particularly equation. However, the good news with any climb is at some point there must be a descent and this one was a doozy. From Kendal we decided we still had some leg power so went another seven miles to Windermere. In an effort to make the horrible looking day four easier, we then kept going another four miles into the very pretty Ambleside, completing our first 80 mile day.

Dinner that night was much better than the horrible Little Chefs that had punctuated the first few days. We dined in a great gastropub by the lake and had food that had really been cooked and not just reheated, and simultaneously set a new world record for carb-loading. Unfortunately we then had to return to the Kendal Travelodge that looked remarkably like a remand centre for a well-earned sleep.