Around the Coast of Britain

After LEJOG to celebrate our silver wedding anniversary, Christine’s motivation for cycling slipped somewhat.  Reaching the conclusion that she needs a “goal” to get her on the saddle with any regularity, we were looking around for a “theme”.  When it came it was a joint effort (as many things are!) – Stephen happened on a website looking for participants in a sponsored trip around the entire coast of Britain in 60 days (a distance of something over 4,000 miles) and Christine linked it with a radio programme she had listened to about a man cycling around the world “in stages” comprising his two week holidays. And so the concept was born.   We would cycle around the coast in a series of legs or stages, generally in a clockwise direction, mainly using trains to get to and from the end points.  As many trains from Tadworth go to London Bridge station, the bridge itself seemed an iconic place to start (and hopefully end!).  Originally the idea was to start where we had finished the previous leg.  This worked well for a time, while we were going round the south east coast close to home, but as we moved further afield days trips became infeasible and it became more difficult to fit together stretches that were a “weekend long” with those requiring 4 or 5 days or even 2 weeks (around the west and north coast of Scotland).