Day 2 Trevallett (Cornwall) - Wellington (Somerset)

Day 2 is now complete, the important daily statistics are:

Miles: 76.2
Climbing: 4581ft
Average Speed: 13.1 mph
Max Speed: 40.3 mph
Time Riding: 5 hr 48 mins
Total Duration: 8 hr 18 mins
Steepest Gradient:

River Tamar

Started out much later than yesterday, rolling out of the Three Quoins B&B after a very relaxing and pleasant nights stay, at 09:15. Fuelled by a Full English breakfast the ride started out at a fairly decent pace, passing through Launceston before quickly arriving at the Devon border. This was the start of close to 4500 ft of climbing. The Devon hills certainly match their Cornwall neighbors for intensity but I found that they differed on how they inflicted pain. Where I found the Cornwall hills to be steep but short the Devon ones are less steep but are much longer. Really draining!!
I'm sure this was also made worse by the 91 miles put in yesterday making for some slow going. Now enough of the hills, the Devon countryside is awesome, really accentuated by the glorious sunshine.

Lunch was a welcome break, a hearty ham ploughman's washed down with a glass of St. George's ale, at the White Hart in Bow.

The ride for the early part of the afternoon continued to be a hard fought effort,  requiring a 4 mile detour to Tiverton to rehydrate. After replenishing the H2O stores the riding eased as I got to enjoy the Grand Western Canal for 5 or 6 miles. After the canal I had only 10 miles to complete, with the Devon / Somerset border crossed I entered Wellington and made it to the overnight stop by 17:30.

The second day now crossed off and on to day 3, planned to be far easier when it comes to climbing with only 1900ft, as I work my way up the coast towards Weston Super Mare and then onto Thornbury.

Tiverton

Grand Western Canal

LEJOG and not getting lost

On a journey of almost 1000 miles and 13.5 days the inevitable is likely to happen where I get lost and ride in quite possibly the wrong direction. A thousand miles in the correct direction is going to be hard enough so I certainly don't want to add any unneeded miles especially if they include climbing hills.

Thankfully modern technology is all around us and I will be taking advantage of the high tech on offer with possibly a fall back on some rather low tech paper maps as a backup.

If you have read my post LEJOG - My Route you will have seen my routed plotted out on the website ridewithgps.com. This has been a great resource for route planning, allowing detailed route manipulation. All the routes for my 13.5 day LEJOG adventure have been saved online but using them direct from the website to navigate whilst riding through the British country side is just a bridge too far. Thankfully the site allows all of the saved routes to be exported in various formats to be programmed into GPS devices.

My cycle GPS computer of choice is the Garmin Edge 800 which in addition to recording ride details also has a mapping function. RWGPS can export 3 main formats compatible with the Edge 800, TCX Course, GPX Track and GPS Route. I have tested GPX track a few times and found it to be reliable on the Edge 800 and will be the likely format of choice but if I have time over the next two weeks I would like to try TCX course as it includes turn by turn directions with notification whereas GPX Track lays out a course to be followed, though from experience if you do wander of course you can use the maps and navigate back to the intended route. Guess I need to make a decision! If still undecided prior to leaving for the UK I may just export in both formats and copy onto the Edge and decide which to use once I get there. Thankfully the Edge has plenty of memory space especially with the addition of an 8GB micro SD card which is also being used to contain the maps.

Garmin offer their own maps but at $50 plus per map so it can get quite expensive, especially when you want to update. Fortunately there is a much cheaper and in my opinion equally as good an option and that is the Open Street Maps. Links to Garmin formatted maps can be found at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download. The beauty of the OSM is that the maps tend to be updated on a fairly regular basis and are available at no cost. I have been using the North American maps since December and find them to be as accurate as any Garmin maps I have used. Details on how to download and use can also be found on the link above.



Now off to finish the route fine tuning so I can get them exported!

LEJOG - My Route

The Route

Land's End to John O'Groats or John O'Groats to Land's End

The first decision to be made before I could start planning the route details was whether to attempt LEJOG or JOGLE. As both ends of the journey are at roughly sea level the overall climbing would be the same in either direction so no advantage is gained, the only advantage LEJOG has over JOGLE is the prevailing wind which due to the jet stream blows from the South West. So this is the primary reason why I am doing LEJOG and not JOGLE, riding 1000 miles into a headwind whilst a challenge is not something I relish. Maybe next time I'll do JOGLE

LEJOG Route

So having decided on the direction of travel  the detailed route planning was started and it has been a lengthy monumental task taking almost 4 months with tweaking still being done to this day.
The beginning and end are obviously fixed points but there is no set route that must be followed. There are numerous guides and books available offering routes and many resources online with helpful advice but the final decision is up to personal preference.
The route for me was influenced by the following:

# of Days Available
Distance Cycled per day
Climbing per Day
Availability of suitable accommodation (not just for me but also my bike)

The number of days available was set by the vacation days I have accrued and the amount of time I can reasonably take of off work. This I figured to be 14 days.

Daily Mileage, based on the total expected mileage and days available I averaged out I would need to ride between 70 and 75 miles each and everyday. 

Climbing, Whilst keeping this to a minimum some days will have significantly more climbing than others. where possible some days the mileage ridden will be slightly longer so as to avoid significant climbs.

Suitable Accommodation for me and secure storage for the bike are not always within the average mileage I am planning to ride daily, in fact even finding towns and villages within the average mile was sometimes difficult. This all played into the planning and has required some days to be shorter and others significantly longer than average.

Day 0 - Land's End to Hayle

Day 1 - Hayle to Launceston

Day 2 - Launceston to Wellington

Day 3 - Wellington to Thornbury

 

Day 4 - Thornbury to Stourport

Day 5 - Stourport to Tarporley

Day 6 - Tarporley to Lancaster

Day 7 - Lancaster to Carlisle

Day 8 - Carlisle to Biggar

 

Day 9 - Biggar to Callander

Day 10 - Callander to Fort William

Day 11 - Fort William to Inverness

Day 12 - Inverness to Helmsdale

Day 13 - Helmsdale to John O'Groats THE END.

After reaching JOG the riding is not quite done, despite being close to 1000 miles at this point I have two more comparatively short rides, 20 miles each. I'll be off to Thurso for the celebratory evening of relaxing with a pint or two and sore muscles and the next morning riding over to Wick to pick up a rental car for 600 mile drive south to Staffordshire to visit family for a couple of days.