WE DID IT!

Well, We Did It!!!!! 334 Miles covered in 23 hours on the saddle, over 4 days.
Average speed of 14.9 mph, with 30000 Calories burnt each.
Here’s how we did it.

Day 1
London to Portsmouth - 84 miles
We started from Tower Bridge just after 10am. The guys from our van sponsor, Home delivery network managed to temporarily block off part of the bridge to allow us to all start together in one group, over the bridge.

Traffic out of London was pretty heavy for the first 20 miles or so.
Photo stop just outside Woking at the Maclaren headquarters was cut short by the security guard shouting at us for walking our bikes on the grass.

Stop at Wetherspoons for a spot of lunch was followed by the final push down to Portsmouth. Jimbo forwent lunch in order to get a good head start, and the next time most of us saw him, was at the ferry port!
A few of us managed to get lost somewhere along the final leg of today’s route – That A3 is bloody busy as it gets down to the A3(M) !! The group strung out a fair bit – something that needed to be worked on over the following days. Roads, pot-holed to hell for a lot of the day!
Arrived at the ferry port with at least 2 hours to spare, so a job well done!

Leader of the Sprint Comp – Rashers / Gareth
Leader of the Overall Comp – RePhil
Punctures - 0

Day 2
St. Malo to Mayenne – 82.2 Miles
Disembarked ferry where our final team member Bandit was waiting for us, ready like a coiled spring!!
We flexed our linguistic muscles on the unsuspecting French by ordering breakfast at a Café, in St Malo, then set off around 11am after Matt had done a spot of water shopping.

Probably the hottest day of the ride saw us following the beautiful coastline for a few miles towards Mont St Michel before heading inland for lunch. Our first casualty today was Rashers coming off – doing a spot of “Where have them lot gone” then realising the kerb was fast approaching – good bit of gravel rash for Rashers!

Lunch at Nancy’s (PB’s Sister) house was legendary! – Beautiful house in the middle of the country-side, food and drink a-plenty and best of all, some friendly faces!! They also helped to refine our route slightly as well which shaved a mile or two off the day. We could have stayed there all day quite easily! Thanks again to John and Nancy for their wonderful hospitality.
The afternoon saw us head further inland, and after a quick puncture fix by Baz, we headed east to Mayenne where we checked into the hotel.

Leader of the Sprint Comp – Rashers
Leader of the Overall Comp – RePhil
Leader of the King Of The Mountains Comp – RePhil / Rashers
Punctures – 1 (Bazzer)

Day 3
Mayenne to Belleme – 66 Miles
Jimbo’s Birthday!!
The shortest day of the ride, before the biggie of day 4 saw our head support driver Matthew take up the challenge. Borrowing Jimbo’s bike, with no training, and in his Newcastle United shirt, he set off with the rest of us at a good pace.

Lunch at Allencon was in a supermarket car-park. Our feast was laid out in front of us using a shopping trolley and some flattened bike boxes for a table top – Ideal!!
We all stayed together pretty well for the rest of the ride, and the terrain was great, nice flat sweeping, smooth roads.

Arrived at a rather posh golf club hotel for the evening where we were treated to 2 talents that our group demonstrated. After very little persuasion from Kibbs, Stuart cleared a space in the club bar, put some music on his mobile, and “threw some shapes and busted some moves” for us and the golf club on-lookers. Proper Breakdancing!!!
Later in the evening, Spooky got on the piano and took requests, everyone had a good old knees up! – The refined residents of the golf club didn’t know what hit em, but they loved it! (Well, most of them did!)

Leader of the Sprint Comp – Rashers
Leader of the Overall Comp – RePhil
Leader of the King Of The Mountains Comp - RePhil
Punctures - 0

Day 4
Belleme to Paris – 101 Miles
We decided that as this was the longest day, we’d better make an early start, so we set off at 7am without a proper breakfast (we’d stop for some after a few miles had been eaten up). It was horrible weather, it had rained in Belleme from just after we had arrived the previous day, and we had left there in the rain this morning.

It was a steady pace though and the miles soon got eaten away.
Once the rain clouds went away, we were left with perfect riding, not too hot, it had dried up and we had beautiful smooth, rolling roads in front of us.
By the time we got to Versailles, the sun had come out and the final racing standings had already been decided, so our final stop was a trundle, all together in the sunshine, before we hit the really busy traffic of the outskirts of Paris.

The adrenalin was flowing and after Baz had fixed his last puncture in the outer suburbs of Paris, we met the Seine and followed it all the way to the Eiffel Tower where our support crew, wives and several bottle of Champagne were waiting for us!!

Winner of the Overall Competition (Yellow Jersey) RePhil (Phil Nicholl)
Winner of the Sprint Competition (Green Jersey) Rashers (Rich Ashley)
Winner of the King Of The Mountains Competition (Polka-Dot Jersey) Spooky (Luke Kemp)
Winner of the Fundraiser Competition (White Jersey) Spooky (Luke Kemp)
Winner of the Lanterne Rouge (Red Jersey) PB (Paul Bryant)
Punctures – 1 (Bazzer)