The Plan
The new year began with the decision to buy myself a new bike. After a lot of research and question asking I plumped for a Mercian and as I was going to be in the Midlands watching rugby I couldn't resist having a frame made to measure-the most difficult decision, as many people find, was colour. Electric Blue Pearlescent was the final choice.
Now with brand new toy on it's way there had to be special trip and so I began reading about all the other end to end routes-points of the compass, four countries, east of Pennines and so on. But before a decision could be made fate lent a hand.
In February, while still deciding which route to take this time, poor old Fern became very ill and despite everyone's best efforts did not recover. This was an enormous loss as she had been bred by us and was the last of a long line of retrievers we had owned.
It was shortly after this, that in the pub one evening, we came up with our marathon idea for 2008. It suddenly came to me that as for the time being we didn't have a dog Alison could cycle as well and so suggested I cycle up on my own and Alison come up by train and then cycle back together. The theory being that having gone one way I would already be worn out and we could come back in shorter stages. Simple really!
However the plan got even more complicated when first of all we decided on a completely different route to last year and that as we were going all that way we might as well nip over to the Orkneys as well.
Once I put my mind to something I never do things by half and so I decided a route via the Peak District, Yorkshire Dales and Pennines was much more of a challenge and on top of that I would enter Scotland by the highest road crossing at Carter Bar. Altogether this was a trip of approaching 2500 miles and up to six weeks away from home. Alison would be cycling over half of this and also doing end to end by train-which is no mean feat in itself.