By Andy
5th February
As most of you will know by now we have been keeping a blog of our journey. Well, when I say we, I mean Liz has been doing a great job writing the days up. So this is my first blog post.
I’m going to start back at the very beginning so most of you will already have heard the story but I’ll put it in my own words.
As many of you who know me will know I am rather nostalgic about old kids tv programmes and can often be heard signing their theme tunes. Often directly in your face. These could range from; round the twist, bodger and badger, mashed potatoes!!!! and a popular one of choice is of course the chuckle brothers. Slapstick comedy is often seen as a rather low form of comedy but done well it will have you in stitches. It is for this reason that I’m a fan of the chuckle brothers and their awesome catch phrase and theme music. Anyway, I digress.
The journey from Leeds to London airport was always going to be a pain in the nethers with two bike boxes and all our luggage. That said it gave me plenty of opportunity to fit as many chuckle brother references in as physically possible, much to the annoyance of Cooper. The boxes weighed 15kg each and we had a bag with all our panniers which weighed 30kg. The only way to manoeuvre was with one of us at each end of the boxes and the bag on top, hence the constant ‘to me, to you’. This is why I feel I may have mastered the role of a chuckle brother now, and as I recall there is an opening in the chuckle brothers. Since Liz is female, the part is almost certainly mine. RIP Barry you legend!
My friend and work colleague Nick had given us a lift to Leeds coach station in the morning and I was glad that he had made such a practical car choice. He got the car so he could fit his bikes in with ease so it really was the perfect vehicle. As Nick had also done some cycle touring he had given us some essential advice which would definitely cone in handy later. “There WILL be bad days, you just have to push through them and keep going”.
After arriving at Heathrow and putting the boxes and bags on a trolley I did my best to manoeuvre the trolley in a fashion similar to Colin McRae, I even made the sounds at times. This wasn’t really advisable as the boxes took up the whole travellator and I came close to maiming a few stationary people. Who stands still on one of those at an airport anyway. Wait a minute… Colin’s dead too. All my references hmmm.
After getting to the desk we repacked our boxes with all the luggage to an exact 30kg each and checked ourselves and the bags in. We had to go in a back room with two shifty fellas to put our boxes through the scanner. Despite the box saying bicycle in big letters he thought he would ask if they were bikes. He seemed confused as to why we were taking bikes but to be fair to him one lady had thought we were taking mirrors so he is probably still up there in terms of IQ. Anyway through security and only a couple of hours to kill.
After ordering some food, despite Liz insisting we shouldn’t as we would be fed on the plane, we shared a tasty Mac and cheese. This turned out to be a rather good decision as an hour later when we were sat on the plane it was starting to seem every more likely that we weren’t going anywhere. Announcement after announcement declared something else wrong with the plane. Eventually after 4 hours we were told to get off the plane.
I was surprisingly chilled out about what followed as recently I have been struck with a travel curse. A trip to Belgium last year being a total shambles of all forms of transport. After queuing for about 4 hours and tucking into an ice cream in one of the queues, we finally got to a hotel at 4:30 am boxes in tow once more and my audition for the chuckle brothers getting it’s much deserved second reading.
I’ll pick the next part up on the next post but be forewarned. It will contain many swears, in fact it will mostly be swearing.
Until tomorrow.
the road less travelled 
the final views from the top!
Lizard Tracks 