UPDATE - we made it to Spain, 1150 miles and three weeks after leaving De Panne (Belgium). The story of the trip can be summed up in a very few words - cold, hills, rain, wind, more hills, much more wind. All the gory details, including the story of how we almost literally crawled across the Spanish border - there was so much wind it was almost impossible to stand, let alone ride, are at www.ffortissimo.org.uk.============================
Thanks for visiting our Justgiving page.
There's another one
here, which you may also like to visit - we have to set up one for each charity we're raising cash for.
We will be cycling from De Panne in
Belgium (it's on the
North Sea), through France to the Ile de
Noirmoutier (that's on the
Atlantic) and then down to Port Bou in
Spain (that's on the
Mediterranean). We'll be doing the whole
thing on a tandem. The coincidence of being able to get a perfect
anagram between NAtMed and Tandem was too good to resist.
We leave sometime around May
31st (that's the late May bank holiday) and expect to be on the road for
around about 3 weeks. We're then taking a week to come back home again.
For those three weeks, we will be entirely self-sufficient, carrying
everything on the tandem apart from somewhere to sleep!
The basic route is on
Mapmyride.com,
and once you add in all the wiggles of the French road network it adds
up to something in excess of 1000 miles. We'll be taking a bike computer
and probably a GPS so that we can keep track of
exactly how far
it is.
Why? Why not! Stephen has a
significant birthday later in 2010 he wants to mark in a special way,
and wants a long holiday. Rachel also wants a long holiday, but her
significant birthday was a few years ago (she organised a concert
singing
Spem in Alium and other music for a significant number of
voices). Of course the downside of having a long holiday in June is
that neither of us can take much time in the rest of the year. And the
downside of cycling in June in France is that it's likely to be
hot.
This page is set up to raise funds for Help the Hospices, the corporate charity supported by Stephen's employers. They are offering to match all donations made, pound for pound, up to £1000. We are
also taking donations for UCLH Charity, the charity which raises funds for University College London Hospitals and also the organisation which Rachel works for.