Final Thoughts

Day 11: John O’Groats to….home

Cycling time: zero!

We’re on our long journey home now after a fantastic trip and thought we would sign off the blog with a few final thoughts and thankyous.

Let’s begin with the latter by thanking you all for your great support and interest in the trip. We know a lot of you have been following our journey very closely on this blog and we have all greatly enjoyed putting it together over a pint in the evening. We certainly haven’t been short of stories to tell and pictures to show and even videos. We also know that you were all avidly watching to see if your guess of our final cycling time was correct – ironically our final time of just over 64 hours was virtually an average of all the guesses we received.

Thanks must go to all of you who have offered donations to our chosen charity, Prostrate Cancer. We have now received well over £3,500 in donations, including well over £100 from complete strangers who stopped us in the street to dip in their pockets during our travels. It certainly seemed that the charity struck a real chord with people. One chap memorably started telling us about the treatment he was receiving, while several ladies told us how their husbands had struggled with the cancer. We are still counting our final donations but we expect to be very close to the £4,000 mark once all donations are finally collected.

A special thankyou too to all those riders who joined us at various points during the ride to pace us for a few miles. This was especially helpful during our epic day over Shap Fell from Preston when I think otherwise we may have really struggled, but in particular Greg’s humour kept us going! And a few other special mentions. Bev and Reggie for buying us a bottle of champagne for our final night’s meal; and Matt and Sacha for driving us to a great country pub on our second night when spirits were rather low after a very wet afternoon.

Finally we thought we would sign off with our own round-up of the various highs and lows of the trip. Goodbye all, and thanks for listening.

Best view: Remote northern Scottish highlands/Tintern Abbey, Wye Valley

Best hotel: Cherrybrook Hotel, Dartmoor

Best restaurant: Fiddlers, Dromnadrochit

Best pint: Monster munch, Dromnadrochit

Best breakfast: Ben Loyal, Tongue

Best cake: Coffee cake, Onich

Worst rainstorm: Gretna Green

Worst wind: The (long & winding) road to Kilmarnock

Worst hill: Princetown, Dartmoor

Stat box

Puncture count: Graham 4, Jim 3, Richard 2, Nigel 0

Dickie’s diet

Calorie burn: 72,000

Calorie intake: unknown

Result to be posted tomorrow once weigh-in has been completed…