damerell

Well, we made it. The world's breasts are saved!

We went up to London from Nerdvana on Saturday; with my lappie to enable me to work in Cambridge on the Monday, we had full rear panniers and saddlebag. I dropped Robin at the Angel so he could go and deal with some last-minute work panic; nothing says Billy-No-Mates like a man riding a tandem solo, but I rolled up to the Pembury anyway, where Robin would later join me. Obviously since we are sensible adults we didn't in any way submit to the malign influence of timeplease and battlekitty and get to bed, rather jolly, at 3am.

We were up a little later than planned after maybe 4 hours sleep, ate a little something over a series of protesting half-awake grunts from hazyjayne, and we rolled up to the start to meet lnr and Mike no more than 20 minutes late.

Unfortunately, while we'd planned to ride with them, well; my advice is, don't set out on a 50 mile ride with no puncture spares. With neither pump nor tube to fit Mike's bike, and with escaping Slime making patching impossible, his spectacular blowout meant we trotted up to the first rest stop alone, and it became clear they weren't going to get under way any time soon, so we set off alone at the very back of the field. This was very gratifying in a way, since we were constantly overtaking people.

After that we just plugged away steadily, stopping for orange juice and to lounge around at most rest stops. One or two short but steep climbs; one or two fast descents - the drum brake's cable attachment failed, but we weren't going to need it in East Anglia. We rode with one similarly-paced tandem team for a while - they had a slight advantage uphill related to less luggage and fewer pies - but left them when they dropped the chain, which didn't happen to us once. We didn't stop for any real food, since the planned pub wasn't admitting smelly cyclists; we should have taken the advice of the couple at the previous rest stop.

Soon enough we arrived at Midsummer Common, where we spotted (amongst others) a 1930s touring tandem - 9-speed, with a 3-speed Cyclo mounted on a 3-speed Sturmey Archer hub. From there it's a short hop to Relativity and a disco nap before dinner at Oblivion and showing the thing off at the Carlton.