One wheel, one
long route.
The Whitehaven Cycle Fundraisers undertake a bike
ride every year to raise money on behalf of a local chairty. Way back in
January I was dared to enter this ride that spanned England; leaving
from Whitehaven on the West Coast and finishing in York.
For me, this
would be a journey of about 111 miles.
There's a couple of problems with
this challenge, the biggest one being that I don't own a bicycle of any
description - I do however own a unicycle.
Unicycles are normally
confined to the circus, or occasionally to a very small number of stunt
unicyclists - both of these groups are leagues ahead of me. I started unicycling
in 2004 and for the first two years I pretty much just fell about my kitchen and
my living room. I once destroyed a pair of trousers by falling in a somewhat
inconvenient manner. In 2007 I broke my hand by unicycling into a lamp post - I
then went to a job interview and had to explain how safety conscious and
responsible I was. I got the job.
So on Friday the 20th of June, a
good friend of mine, Izzy Styles, took me to Whitehaven Harbour where
Chris Gallagher joined me for the start of our
adventure.
The official bike
ride headed straight through the heart of the Lake District; this route was
no good for me - with my peddles bolted directly to my wheel my ability to go up
hills was somewhat restricted. With this in mind I took a longer route
round the Cumbrian coast which took me to the Kendel-Lancaster canal. The
wonderful thing about canals is that the tow path follows along a reasonably
straight and flat route - perfect for me!
After reaching Carnforth, we headed east for Settle. Unfortunatly at this point the weather took a turn for the worse and the rest of the day was spent battling wind and rain.
On Sunday, we got onto the Liverpool - Leeds canal. This is a fantastic cycle route - it's been renovated to allow bikes to travel safely away from the dangers of roads. Obviously there's the added fun of having water to one side, but the camaraderie of the people we met more than made up for this.
After saying goodbye to Zoe on the Sunday evening, all that was left to do was to complete the final leg of the trip from Selby to York. This is another brilliant cycle route which. I appreciate it when I notice innovative little differences in life and this cycle route was one of those. The entire cycle route was a model of our solar system - at one end was a model of the Sun and then there were models of each of the plants which was built to scale. This meant that the dinal day of my journey was navigated by the celestial bodies - something that I really was not expecting!
The final push of the trip was finding the finish line. I decided that I wanted to finish at a York landmark - the Minster!