So here it is…
Over the course of the last few week’s I have been reviewing other blogs to understand as much about the proposed route as possible. I used a few different blogs to decide on my route, one of them was a 6 day cycle and the others are 10 days. Using these to see which actual route they take and then plot my 6 night 7 day cycle route along a similar path. This was a massive help as I started working from Land’s End heading north, although I do intend to ride south from John o ‘Groats, the route for the best part will be the same in either direction. As I know the average distance each day needs to be around 130 miles, I originally looked at Tiverton for my first stop, however when I read through a few more blogs I found out that Cornwall is a lot more steep than meets the eye! Most of the 10 day routes stop in Okehampton, so I decided to follow the trend and have either a shorted first or last day at around 112 miles. The rest of the miles will have to be made up during the middle days on slightly “flatter” terrain.
So as it stands I have booked all the hotels for the trip, this includes bi-directional booking. Using Booking.com I used free cancellation as one of my filters so that I have up until the week before I go to cancel hotels for the route I opt out of. This decision will be made based solely on the direction of the wind, no one wants to spend 7 days riding into a head wind! Fingers crossed the wind reports are accurate as I could end up with egg on my face!
Day 1 – John o ‘Groats to Inverness
Day 2 – Inverness to Tarbet
Day 3 – Tarbet to Carlisle
Day 4 – Carlisle to Warrington
Day 5 – Warrington to Ross-On-Wye
Day 6 – Ross-On-Wye to Okehampton
Day 7 – Okehampton to Land’s End
Although my end points for each day are defined, I am yet to go into the finer detail and plan each day’s cycle route. I used Strava to map this out whilst working on the route for hotel booking. However I will be creating each route and loading them onto my Garmin Edge 1030 over the next few weeks. Strava has a cool feature that allows you to choose a route by most popular roads and also with minimum elevation (something I will be making most use of). The current route is looking to range anything from 910 to 950 miles, which will be around an average of 130 miles per day.
Those of you that want to make a donation, head over to my fundraising page for more information.
I Just Felt Like Cycling 