Striking North at last – 85 Kms in rather nice weather , Sandiway , Northwich

After our side ways progress as we moved up through Cornwall , Devon , Wales we have now made decisive progress north – crossing into Cheshire today. Tomorrow we head through some more built up , overpopulated country with Liverpool on our west and the huge city of Manchester to our East.

Today we flew – nice quiet roads and Marty and Jamie were ready for some faster paced action. Towards the end of the ride – after some lunch digestion had occurred , Jamie seems to get an energy transfusion and it was all on – I struggled to hold his wheel as we steamed up the small hills in the last 15 Kms.

The ride started with a wonderful long climb up out of the warm valley and Ironbridge. View of close by cooling towers as we climbed

Marty and Jamie crossing into Cheshire

Marty Jamie and I have been having real problems with getting a decent caffeine fix here -today’s lunch stop was no exception. A flat white may simply be some filtered coffee with a little frothed milk on top. The Poms have perfected the art of producing the ultimate crema- less expresso . While they very often have nice Italian coffee machines they appear to have little understanding of the fine art of coffee making. Or are we just coffee snobs?

We have started grading the coffee, 0 to 10 and so far nothing has am it passed 5. Today’s lunch spot was a cycling oriented cafe in an old town called Audlem. Coffee score 2 – the cycling memorabilia cafe was still ok – kind of

Tern X30
Elias rides this very cool X30 folder – very quick bike , and no significant disadvantage to riding a normal road bike. Bit more bumpy and not so good for hands free riding in my opinion – I know as I am an owner of one of these little beauties too.

This is John , our tour boss – he coordinates everything and he and Ozzie do a lot of work making everything come together . These guys even went as far as cleaning our bikes yesterday afternoon. David K elected to have his bike NOT CLEANED as he has this strange fancy of seeing the accumulated grime from Cornwall Devon etc build up.

poor photo of David and his Ortlieb real saddle bag. He Really loves this bag and his vision is to see it filled with bottles of single malt as me move into Scotland later in the week. I suspect Marion has made him puts rocks inside the bag – something to toughen him up.

This is Bill -he is in the wealth creation industry and at 73 years old a very fit guy

Finally this is a pic of Colin. He is English but lives somewhere up in the colder parts of Canada where the freezing arctic blast turns men from glass half full to glass half empty.