Day 16 – nailed it!!!

Today was always going to be a day of mixed emotions. Excitement that we’d be getting to the finish line, relief that we would not be sitting on saddles for a while and sadness the adventure is coming to an end. I count myself incredible fortunate that I’ve been able to spend this quality time with Tates & Milo, seeing the country from top to bottom.

Anyway, to our final day (and it was a corker….)

Had a lovely evening catching up with mum and dad. (No food and accommodation reviews today for obvious reasons 😉

We planned for a start around 9am, coffee in Penzance and I was shooting for an optimistic finish at 12:30 ish

The met office forecast a dry day, with <5% chance of rain. So as expected, within a few minutes we were cycling into thick, drizzly fog and getting soaked to the skin. I had planned a direct route via Helston, but the fog was so think and the traffic so dicey we took to the back roads and trusted google to find us a route.

Riding down the lanes we had a few false turns with locked farm gates. It then took us down one “road” that turned into an episode from Bear Grills.

Pushing the bikes and climbing over fallen trees, we were even more wet with some nettle stings for good measure.

Odds-on one of us would get puncture and 5 mins later Tates’ back tyre was flat as a pancake. A quick change later and we were on our way.

The next 30 mins were pretty uneventful as the weather started to dry out. We dropped down to the coast and past St. Michaels mount.

Rolling into Penzance we were looking forward to a pasty. As we got near the harbour I spotted a boat that might have belonged to one of my best friends I’d not seen for 11 years. We hot footed it over to the pier and amazingly it was him. He was over from the Isles of Scilly with some fog bound passengers! We had an awesome time catching up before he needed to head back and we needed to push on

(Was great to see you James, We will definitely get over to Scilly soon)

Rolling around the edge of Penzance we stopped for a very quick sausage roll before we climbed out through Newlyn for the last 15km to Lands End.

Hammer down, we wizzed through the last few climbs and before we knew it we were rolling in though to the finish line in Lands End.

Mum and Dad were there to cheer us in and bought the all important bubbles

They even bought treats for Milo

What an adventure… need to write up our thoughts now that it’s all finished

Lessons learned from the last day on the road:

1 – despite the temptation to finish quickly, don’t break your planning rules and drop in an A Road

2 – chance stuff does happen – what was the probably of meeting up with James!

3 – Lands Ends sucks. Unless you’re JOGLE / LEJOG’ing, it’s not a tourist destination worth visiting

Key stats:

56 km cycled (1571km total)

771m climbing (15611m total)

2 lejog cyclists seen (82 total)

Cake of the day: (bummer, didn’t stop for cake today, but did have more of mum’s flapjacks)

epilogue to follow when we have caught up on sleep. Thx for reading and for all your comments