A Little Trip to France

Well i feel i should apologise somewhat to the avid readers of this blog, all 3 of you that probably is, but after a snowy, sleety unrideable afternoon in the North West of England i logged into my account to see if anyone had messaged me...etc and realised the last time i updated this blog with information regarding what i have actually been doing was quite a long time ago. I could make up a massive list of half decent excuses but the stark reality is that i have been exceptionally lazy.

So without further ado this is what i have been up to over the last couple of weeks. I finally finished work at Waitrose on the 5th Feb and my god what a relief it was no longer will i be rocking up back home at 10:30 at night with a body in ruins, i am sure all of you riders out there will appreciate how painful walking around for 9hrs as a bike rider is...ouchy. Having said that i would like to extend a massive thank-you to almost everyone at Waitrose, i know some of you are reading this, for making the last 6 months of work a complete laugh. After my last shift the members of my Section all headed out into town for a curry as a farewell meal where i preceded to show everyone how much i can eat, which incidentally is a lot.

The weekend after i finished work literally flew by, i managed to ride for just over 4hrs on both the Saturday and the Sunday, with the afternoons taken up organising my life as on Monday myself and Phil Gale, teammate for the season and all round sound geezer, were off to France to drop our gear off, pick our kit up, get our licences sorted and generally get sorted for the season.

Monday morning soon arrived, my car was packed and the sat nav set to my first destination...Phil's house, after the best part of 5hrs i arrived at Phil's and after a quick turn around and way too much coffee in a short space of time we were on the road again heading to Portsmouth ready to get the Ferry to St Malo. Having been on the go for the best part of 10hrs i was glad we had a cabin booked for the overnight crossing and soon the snores of two tired bike riders was drowning out the sound of the diesel engine powering the boat along.

The morning soon arrived...or rather it didn't, forgetting the consequences of the continent being an hour ahead on time, we left the boat at 8:45am still in the dark which was a little disorientating, but we were on the road heading to Hennebont and with Ian Brown on the CD player it was all smiles in the Astra.

After 2.5hrs of driving we reached our destination and headed into town for a coffee, before going to the Presidents house, running errands, going to the doctors...etc all boring things that i do not really need to talk about here. A lovely evening meal with the Presidents family followed however it was soon off to bed ready for the 6am wake up to get the ferry back to the UK. Now 8hrs on a boat during the day didn't appeal to me much before and certainly does not now, fortunately myself and Phil were pretty tired so managed to sleep for most of it but man was it a drag. On our way back into Portsmouth though we did manage to capture some pretty good pictures of the sunsetting, goes to show that there are some decent places in the UK too.

The view from the Ferry entering Portsmouth, nice i think you will agree.

Once we hit the port i dropped Phil off with his Dad, who had rather kindly offered to pick Phil up in Portsmouth thus saving me about 3hrs on my journey back up north, filled up with Petrol and smashed it back up north back in time for tea...well not really.

After missing 3 days of riding during my travels i decided to put a hard block in over the last weekend, doing 3hrs on Thursday, 4.5hrs on Friday, 5hrs on Saturday and 6hrs on Sunday with a 50mile reliability thrown in for the mix, i think my form is about right as i was still feeling pretty strong on the Sunday, having done some efforts in each of the preceding rides also. It is a nice feeling to know now though that when i get back from a ride i do not have to rush round to get ready for work, i can eat and get a quick nap in to aid the recovery.

With me off to Gran Canaria on Saturday to meet up with Phil again i am spending the last few days in the UK relaxing and riding as much as the weather will allow before heading to Gran Canaria for 2.5 weeks and finally to France for the season on 12th March.