the 'Long Way Up!' blog

Monday 20^th – have we set a new world record?

 Monday morning greeted us with a fine view of Harlech Castle and Snowdon from the cottage we were staying in – both bathed in glorious sunshine.  At last the bad weather had broken and now it was only our hangovers which stopped us rushing straight up the mountain that morning … drinking on an empty stomach was a great idea at the time but somehow had lost its attraction the morning after!  A cooked breakfast and copious amounts of sugared tea later we were right as the proverbial rain we’d encountered the days before.   Alex and Gareth did the radio interview and then we all packed to head for Snowdon .  The ride over was fantastic with sweeping bends round the mountains as we headed for Pen Y Pass.  Once there Gareth continued on his way and we got ready for the mountain.  We said our quick goodbyes, it had been a great time chatting about worky stuff as well as riding together but we had a challenge to do (and Gareth had the rest of his programme to make!).

We set off at a good pace and managed to keep it going most of the way up.  We bagged the mountain in 1hr 45mins which whilst not a new world record was definitely a personal best for us both.  We were down in 1hr 15mins making a round trip of 3 hrs which we were impressed with.  Having finished  ahead of our expected time, there was an opportunity to sample thechip butties on sake at the café before packing up once again and heading to the Lakes.  We’d done a mountain and now had a 200 mile journey ahead of us.  Three and a half hours later we were at the Ambleside Youth Hostel, very tired but also very happy.  We had lone mountain down and two to go and we were already getting on for half our total mileage.  The challenge really felt like it was in our grasp …

Tuesday 21^st – has anyone seen Alex’s pants?

By now we feel like we’re really into the challenge.  It’s a tough old monster we’ve created but at times it treats us well, like the free breakfast at the Youth Hostel.  We’d never stayed in a youth hostel before and didn’t know what to expect.  At Ambleside, the breakfast is gut-busting!  So far on this challenge we have only been eating a hearty breakfast and then pretty much little else all day.  The morning kicked off with a quick ride to Keswick for our morning of fundraising.  We were in the town centre and after a slow start, by lunch time we had two full shaker tins!  Alex had a quick chat with Fran from BBC Radio Nottingham when she phoned to catch up on our progress.  Then we had two local papers catch up with us for impromptu interviews and photo sessions.  We even had people telling us that our challenge was preceeding us on local TV as we’d been given a shout out on Border TV News – all good stuff for raising the profile of the challenge.

We headed back to the youth hostel, got our stuff together and headed over to Scafell Pike .  We’d practised on this mountain a fortnight ago (our only day of training before the challenge!) so we were confident we could do a good time.  However, it looked like the weather had other plans!  Half way up it started to become foggy and by the time we were nearing the top there was a raging gale and visibility was down to a few metres.  Alex slogged it out but Ben seemed as nimble as a mountain goat!  We made it to the top in 1hr 45mins which we were very happy with.  Photos at the top and the ritual sip of ‘Irish Mist’ from Ben’s hip flask, we headed back down.  I think Ben may have enjoyed more than a sip, because on the way down he didn’t keep a very straight path!  We were almost running down as we tried to better our time from before.  We did it!  Down in 1hr and 2mins we’d done the whole mountain in 2hrs 47mins!

We rode back to the hostel taking us through some fantastic scenery which we enjoyed all the more so because there was hardly any traffic.  We got back, tired but satisfied in having bagged our second mountain.  Two down, and only the big one to go!

 It was then as we got back to our room Alex couldn’t find his pants!  He’d left them on the window sill to dry alongside his spare two pairs of socks.  Only the socks were there! Then as we looked out our window we could see the proverbial under crackers settled into the guttering – well at least they were clean!

What a fantastic day, everything is going our way, or are we just being lulled into a false sense of security for what Scotland might have to offer …

Wednesday 22^nd  - have we finished the challenge already?

We packed up our kit and fought our way down three floors of stairs against a rabble of ‘young adults’ coming the other way, trying to squeeze past us and our panniers!  These were the same people who’d been sitting by the main door when we arrived with our baggage giggling and flirting with other boys and girls as they drank bottles of ‘Smirnoff wotevva’.  Obviously their hormones and tolerance for alcopops has developed well in advance of their logic for using/blocking the stairs (or maybe I’m just getting ready for the next series of grumpy old men!).

It was a fantastic morning, bright blue skies greeted us as we blasted out of the lakes.  Ben had the video camera mounted on his helmet but it wasn’t until an hour up the road we found that the video had managed to switch itself off and we’d missed a lot of great scenery.  We stopped at Gretna services for a quick coffee and then took the Dunfries and Kilmarnock roads to Glasgow where we had an appointment with one of our sponsors – Scottoiler.  When we got there we were greeted by Nick who’d been the first person to respond as a corporate sponsor of our challenge.  Without him, we’d have probably not figured our ‘little’ challenge was worth hawking around major companies so it was good to be able to pop in and catch up in person.  No sooner had we arrived than Mark (the mechanical mastermind) had asked for the bike keys.  Just as I was thinking he was about to go for a jolly, he’d spotted our Scottoiler was empty and blocked and that it would be his pleasure to refit it and set it up for us again.  In the meantime we were treated to coffee and sandwiches with an extra special treat of some wedding cake as Nick had just returned from honeymoon and saved us some!

 We met up with Fraser Scott (the man behind Scottoiler) and in no time at all we’d managed to idle away a couple of hours.  Just as we left there was another surprise – a cheque towards our fundraising for a not insignificant amount.  Scottoiler have been truly exceptional in their support – thank you so much on behalf of both our chosen charities.

Back on the road with the chain now happy it was being oiled, we pressed on to Fort William with an amazing ride through Glencoe.  For anyone who’s never been … go there!  Its one of the wonders of the British Isles with a deep valley formed thousands of years ago where the mountains look like a great hand has reached down, grabbed the earth and yanked it up before setting it in stone.  The mountains rise up from the floor and a thin road winds like a ribbon around them.  It’s a truly humbling experience to travel along this road, all the more so on a motorbike sweeping through the bends and past the other traffic.  Crikey, I’d better stop this, I’m getting all poetic – see, that’s the effect this place has on me!

We arrived at Fort William in good time and settled into our latest digs … Huntingtower Lodge.  The owners, Alison and Aitken made us feel very welcome (they’d already given us a discount in support of our challenge) and even let me put the bike in the their garage.  We set about updating our GPS track only to find, horror of horrors, it had not been recording our track (again!).  This had happened for Wales and we were gutted not to have a continuous route for you all to see.  We’re especially gutted that our ride to Scotland is also not there – we’ll endeavour to make sure the rest of our journey is recorded, or maybe we should go round twice?!

We walked into the town centre where we bagged Ben Nevis (the pub!) and were about to also take on Everest (Tandoori!) but found a different place to eat instead. Now its 12:30am and I’d better check out of the blog for today and get some sleep – tomorrow is a busy day, fundraising and Ben Nevis back-to-back.  We’ve saved the hardest mountain till last …

Good morning everyone!  Just a quick before we start the day.  We've woken up to thick cloud over the hills - this doesn't bode well!  We checked the weather (the first time since we started as we've been pretty fatalistic about it - after all we're riding and climbing whatever the weather!) and it doesn't look good - cloud and rain is heading our way!  Just when we thought we about home and dry with the mountains, it looks like this challenge has turned on us once again ...

Thursday 23^rd – why did we make the challenge so hard?

We woke this morning with a belt of grey cloud hiding the tops of the hills on the opposite side of the Loch .  Like a drunk guest at a party, it was that kind of thick cloud that didn’t know quite when it was time to go.  Indeed, this cloud looked set to stay all day despite the weather person’s promise that the West would become brighter.  We just hoped we wouldn’t be doing Ben Nevis in the pouring rain.

After a fantastic breakfast courtesy of Alison & Aitken (with special portions of Haggis pudding!) we set off for Fort William to do our last bout of fundraising outside the Cancer Research UK shop.  The ladies there had done a fantastic effort in raising some money before we arrived and then all had a photo sitting on the bike!  We shook our tins all morning and finished with them nearly full.  We even had a special celebrity guest who popped into the shop.  Ben and I did a double take to each other and his parents saw us and smiled knowingly.  We had a chat with them and when he came out he gave us a quick smile, looked a bit self conscious and wandered off.  Modesty dictates that we don’t tell you it was Maggot from Goldy Looking Chain!  It was only afterwars we thought about the missed photo opportunity of having him support the challenge!

 Our collecting over, we headed for the last mountain.  By now the weather had brightened up a bit too much and we got a right sweat on as we began the climb – where was that blasted cloud now to cool us down?!  We struck a good pace even though by now our legs were feeling tired from the previous mountains.  Ben Nevis is not a difficult mountain to climb in itself, but it’s the sheer size of it and the hours of plodding up the track that make it a challenge.  The path was never ending.  At each turn and as we reached the top of each section we thought we were nearly there, but the GPS mocked our progress by telling us we were only half way up – we still had the same amount to do again!  As we continued the cloud swirled around us and soon we were walking in a bleak whiteness with ghostly figures of other walkers in the distance.  2hrs and 55 mins after we’d started we reached the top.  We were both exhausted but very happy to have made our final mountain.  Then we noticed how eerily quiet and still it was – there was no wind at all – here we were, the highest people in the UK , and you could have heard a pin drop!  It also meant that we could stay a while longer at the top without the usual race against hypothermia to get back down.  It was all very relaxed and we were able to look at the monuments and shelters that stand there.  I also videoed a read out of the names of people we’ve dedicated the challenge to on our website.  We’ve taken a piece of paper with us all round the challenge and the idea had been to take it all the way with us.  But sitting on top of that mountain in the stillness it seemed appropriate to leave it there and hope that is stays for a while.

 We headed back down in record time – 1hr 40mins – partly because we took the more direct scree slopes back than the torturous zig-zags we’d come up along.  As we came out of the cloud we saw Glen Nevis below us looking like someone had played with the colour on the TV!  Walking in cloud has that effect, when you get back into ‘colour’ everything looks so vivid that you realise how much you become desensitised to it normally.

There was a light drizzle in the air but we didn’t mind – it was refreshing after such a long slogged out walk.  We got back to our digs where Aitken drove us into town for some food and within an hour we were back – Ben is now asleep as I type and I’m sure I won’t be long awake either.  The challenge feels like its almost over now we’ve done the three highest mountains, but we still have over a 1,000 miles to ride.  We’re now feeling very tired, much as we expected 7 days into the challenge.  Now is the time the challenge will really bite.  We are tired, physically drained and still pushing ourselves as we have two days of long riding to accomplish to stay on target for our return to Matlock Bath on Sunday at 3pm!  If we ever thought it would be easy from now on, we are very wrong …

Blog update

On Friday as we arrived in Thurso and after a mammoth day's riding we found that the wireless internet wasn't wireless after all and so this is the first opportunity I've had to get back to you.  Its now Sunday and we have just finished the challenge!  I'm now sitting at home feeling exhausted after the last few day's riding and adventures which I'll post up in the next day or two along with photos and video clips.  It feels great to be back but also sad that its over until the next time ...

Friday 25^th – is this the longest single track road in the world?

The morning greeted us with a familiarity we’d come to expect - cloud over the hills on the opposite side of the Loch!  But our spirits were lifted as we tucked into our cooked breakfast along with two portions of haggis pudding each!  Suddenly the view from the picture window didn’t seem half as bad and hadn’t we survived the epic journey last Saturday?  Surely we could handle anything that was thrown at us!

We packed up, said our goodbyes to our wonderful hosts (Alison had even washed my clothes and dried them by the morning!) and set off for a day of adventure!  Now, if this was

West – we travelled to Ardnamurchan Point the most Westerly point on the UK mainland … and what a place to put it, right at the end of about 30 miles of single track roads that wind and wend through some fantastic scenery along the water’s edge.  The spot is marked by a magnificent lighthouse (although I rather suspect they built the lighthouse for functionality first!) and we made good use of the café there which itself is built from the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage.  Its no wonder lighthouse keepers used to go mad stuck in the middle of nowhere by themselves – but what a beautiful place to lose your faculties, surrounded by white sand, dolphins, seals and not a lot else.  There’s something about its inaccessibility that makes it all the more inviting (as well as a challenging ride in its own right) but a nice dual carriageway would have made it a lot easier to get to (I’m joking of course!).

Wild animals – at our accommodation in Fort William, Aitken had told me about the Pine Martens they get coming to feed at their bird tables and the deer that come down from the forest.  ‘How fantastic’ I said with the typical enthusiasm of a city dweller.  ‘Mmm, its OK’ said Aitken ‘but the deer eat everything in the garden, they’re pests!’  Well that told me but I still wanted to see something really wild for myself.  And so it happened.  On our ride back from the lighthouse we saw the ‘Monarch of the Glen’ a resplendent red deer stag.  How lucky were we?!  Well not as lucky as the stag, that was plain to see.  He was lying there, head lolling, trussed up on the back of a trailer, looking like he’d wished he not ventured out that morning!  A load of country types in their waxed cotton ‘Barbour’ jackets, gaiters and no doubt even wearing waxed cotton underwear looked rather satisfied with themselves at their morning’s work, but I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the deer.  Later on we saw a real live deer which took us so much by surprise we nearly veered off the road!  Maybe one less stag wasn’t such a bad thing after all (I’m joking again of course)!

Wide open spaces – people told before I ventured further north than Fort William – there’s nothing there!  But they’re wrong – there’s loads – Scotland is massive!  OK, there’s no towns, proper roads, and garages are few and far between … but there’s a vast wilderness that really strikes you as something quite primeval.  This is how Britain was meant to look before McDonalds came along (I mean the Red & Yellow clown chap not ‘real’ MacDonalds from Scotland!).  If you ever want to see a wilderness then here it is – the road to Ullapool – we rode for hours and did not see much more than heathland shrouded in grey mist – it was amazing to think you don’t have to do a grand tour and ride the world to get a real sense of adventure here on the UK mainland.  We made it to Ullapool which was an oasis of a fishing port and with a cup of tea to warm us we headed onto Tongue (another wild track of a road).

Wind & weather – yes, the wind and rain came back to greet us today.  The rain was by no means as bad as the first Saturday of our challenge but I fought a constant battle with the gusting wind to control the bike.  This was perhaps the hardest day’s ride as it was a constant effort to keep the bike pointed in the right direction along the narrow tracks.  Thankfully our kit kept us dry as it had done throughout the challenge – truly top stuff from Triumph!

And so, 400 miles after setting off we arrived at Thurso cold, tired and still with another massive day tomorrow.

Saturday 25^th – I hear its bright down South, but its still windy up North!

Saturday started much like the past few days – grey and gusty.  There were patched of blue sky but we’d already learnt that these don’t mean much on the ground – we could have another tough day ahead of us.  We skipeed breakfast in an attempt to make an early start and get some decent miles behind us before the day woke up.  We headed to Dunnet Head and then to John O’Groats and got to both in short time without many other people about.  We were even too early for the official sign post which stood there as a solitary stump without the usual signs for New York, Lands End etc.  Still, we had our official photo from the other end of the mainland and whilst we took a couple of photos with the post as a backdrop, our main aim today was to ride back to County Durham in good time.   This was no easy task.  We knew we’d be riding all day just to get to Edinburgh by 5pm and then we’d have some more hours after that to get to our final destination that day.  Hopefully the squawly weather would settle down the further south we went.

We weren’t in luck.  With sporadic showers and a constant blustery wind, we had a tough ride all through the day.  Fatigued from the previous day’s ride, today was an even harder ride.  At one point our bike was blown across a lane of the road by the wind and given we were travelling two-up with a heavy load, you could say it took us by surprise!

We stopped off along the way for breakfast and I managed to buy my wife a necklace which I’d give her later that day.  We were stopping with two of her friends and she was coming up to see them as well so we had an extra incentive to make our destination in good time.

As we rode back down the East and centre of Scotland we saw many other bikes coming the opposite way.  We half expected to see Charley and Ewan riding up perhaps doing the ‘Long Way Up!’ challenge behind us, but it turned out there was a massive ‘Thunder in the Glens’ bike meet going on in Aviemore.  Something rather nice about being a biker is the way motorcyclists nod and wave to each other – usually it only happens a few times a day but today I was beginning to get neck ache as I nodded to each rider passing us.  We lost a bit of time through the day due to the weather and traffic, but even  tracks opened up to sweeping roads along the coast, then to roads through massive valleys with the Cairngorms towering up and then the landscape began to roll out towards Northumberland as we progressed from Jedburgh to Allendale (the centre point of the UK and our last milestone).  With a final mad dash across the moors we finally arrived at our friend’s house in Cotherstone that evening and whilst we’d planned to go out, homemade Pizza and beers from the fridge were just what we needed!

Sunday 26^th – are we back already?

Having hyped ourselves up for an early celebration in Cotherstone we’d all gone to bed early so woke up feeling quite refreshed and ready for our final and relatively short ride back to Matlock Bath via the Cat & Fiddle Inn.  We’d covered over 850miles in the previous two days and now had 160 miles left of our challenge.  A quick hop down the A1 and across the M62 left us with A roads across the Pennines towards Macclesfield and then out to the Cat & Fiddle Inn.  We’d arranged a final bike meet there for anyone who fancied riding back with us and as we arrived the car park was crammed with bikes (not all for us I hasten to add!).  About 30 chaps on Monkey Bikes headed off leaving the ‘real’ bikers behind in their exhaust fumes and with a quick coffee to warm us we gathered our gang together.  In all, there were about 22 bikes in our convoy which was a rousing effort and brought a tear to my eye as we rode off.  Some of the people I’d not met before, others I hardly knew and some were from my local bike club (Derbyshire Advanced Motorcyclists) but what a way to finish off the challenge!  10 days earlier we’d set off from Matlock Bath and now we were returning with about 2,800 miles under our belts, the 3 highest mountains, a heap of cash for our charities and some decent research done on the road.  All the pain and effort seemed worth it now!  We’d been advised by the police about the Bank Holiday traffic but managed to keep together and as we entered Matlock Bath our friends and families were there to greet us along with Mick Extance (the UK Dakar champion).  We’d done it!  The ‘Long Way Up!’ challenge was complete and we’d succeeded in doing something unique.  As far as we know no one has ever done this on a motorbike before!

Later that afternoon I got home and put the Tiger away in the garage.  It had performed effortlessly and almost faultlessly throughout the challenge.  Our kit had been fantastic but now it was time to put on some scruffs and take it easy.  My wife made me a cup of tea and within 10minutes I was out cold.  Its as if my mind and body knew I could rest now and suddenly the last 10 days ambushed me with the tiredness I’d been accumulating throughout the challenge.

Its now Wednesday and I’ve been back at work for two days.  Already it feels like I haven’t been away except that I’m playing the usual catch up game on everything that’s happened and preparing for two days working with ‘Bike’ magazine on a rider comfort survey they’re conducting.  I’m still feeling exhausted but with no major symptoms of doing the challenge I almost feel like it wasn’t that bad or difficult really!  However, reading back through the blog and looking at the photos and video moments, brings it all back to me.  From the start we said it was going to be very tough at times but that it would be an adventure and we’d be helping people who are not as lucky as ourselves in many ways.  So far we’ve raised about £4,200 and we’re on course to reach our £5,000 target.

All that remains is to thank you all for supporting us, our fantastic sponsors and members of the public.  Without you all this would have just been a ride round the UK, but with your help, we’ve all managed to do something pretty special to help many people.

We’ll be posting up our photos and videos in the next few days as well as keeping you informed of our latest fundraising figures (you can still donate if you haven’t already!)

I’m already thinking of the next challenge … watch this space!

BBC Radio Nottingham are also be covering the challenge on their website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2007/08/08/long_way_up_bike_challenge_feature.shtml)