Day 6 – Clun to Runcorn – 80 miles

After a lovely breakfast in the sun in Clun, we headed on our 80 miler.  It was billed as a moderate 80, and our average speed and large group cycling backed that up.  We cruised through the morning for the first 25 miles until we entered Shrewsbury.  What a beautiful town, and the birthplace of Charles Darwin, but a town with a driver of a silver Vauxhall Astra who obviously is blind and cannot see cyclists. After her wing mirror touched my elbow she then drove me so close to the kerb I had to un-cleat and put my foot down, she was so close I bashed on her window but was ignored.  Luckily, it was slow moving traffic through the town, but it still made my heartrate rise quite substantially!!

Shrewsbury and Darwin's Quantam Leap Sculpture

After Shrewsbury we headed to the lunch stop at a pub called the Burlton Inn where we had an enormous but very tasty lunch.

Lunch stop

The afternoon’s cycling was sweet, cruising along country lanes, the wind at our backs just ticking off the miles.  We passed over the lovely Shropshire Union Canal and admired the scenery along the route.  The van was stopped at about 64 miles should we need any water or coffee or biscuits etc, so we stopped to fill our bottles.  We parked our bikes along a horse fence and were highly amused to see one of the horses with it's head over the fence starting chewing on handlebars and bar bags…I shared my apple with him, better that than someones braking system!

We rode on towards our destination and I saw a sign for Manchester, which made me realise just how far we had come since Land’s End.  As we were cruising along the A56 towards Frodsham I suddenly felt my steering not working, a flipping puncture with only 5 miles to go!  Sharon’s hubby, who had joined in the ride briefly as they live in the area, very kindly did the inner tube change for me, good man!

After a photo stop at the Mansell office (Steve my hubby works for Mansell in Aberdeen, and Sharon works for Mansell in Frodsham) we headed to the Holiday Inn, our destination for the night.

An amazing day with a lot of speedy cruising, sunshine and blue skies-brilliant!

Roadkill – 2 x wood pigeons, 1 x stoat, another flaming stinky badger! 1 x teeny mouse and several hedgehogs

Mechanicals – 1 x Puncture (me!)

Weather – have a look at my shoulders and you will know!

Chicken update – The suit now has air vents and short sleeves – who let Josh have scissors?