2000 - End to End Diary

Lands End to John O'Groats + Orkney Tandem Tour

The concept for our End to End tour was shaped around two key ingredients:

Easter 2000 was remarkably late and so a two-week (or thereabouts) period combining two bank holidays could be put together, thus not requiring too much annual leave while giving a realistic cycling period to make the ride enjoyable rather than a head down dash – we are definitely cycle tourists. Also with luck spring should have arrived by then with some prospect of reasonable weather?
Transporting the Tandem to and from Lands End and particularly John O’Groats by train is not easy and so some car driving assistance would be a great help. Combining the ride with a theme that picked up on the Citizens Advice Bureaux Network (Sheila is the manager of the Lymington Bureau) might mean that a retired CAB advisor with plenty of free time could be persuaded to drive my car to each end to deliver and collect us. And, just maybe, could provide us with baggage transport.

Planning the route involved hours of enjoyable poring over maps from November until we finally left the following May. For starters we ordered the CTC End to End route pack and borrowed a couple of End to End route books from the library. The Internet also yielded up a heap of accounts of various rides, quite a few of which did not warrant publication anywhere. A new large spiral bound motoring atlas was purchased, dismembered and photocopied. We then stuck it together into three long strips - West Country, England and Scotland - each of which occupied most of the length of Sheila’s lounge floor when unrolled. Armed with coloured pens I drew on the CTC B&B route and Youth hostels route, together with bits of possibly relevant Sustrans routes and variations from other sources.

We came up with a theme for CAB sponsorship based on the fact that we would be doing an End to End journey through Britain. We could use the trip both to publicise the fact that CABx are a national organisation giving good consistent advice everywhere, but also that the organisation is totally reliant on its local offices, locally funded and with local volunteers as advisors. The nearest CAB office to Lands End is Penzance (We cannot manage to fit in a visit to the Isles of Scilly). And the furthest we can reach is at Kirkwall on Orkney, beyond John O’Groats (The Shetlands are also beyond our range for this trip. The strapline for publicity will be:

Citizens Advice Bureaux from Penzance to Kirkwall
Free impartial advice throughout the length of Britain

For our own leaflets and cards we will travel the End to End as a personal "millennium project". Why not? Everyone else has the 2000 label:

A 1000 mile, Year 2000 journey throughout the length of Britain

We highlighted all the towns that have a CAB office on our long strip maps within a broad corridor of our intended route. We then spent lots of time working out variations to the route to link them up. Sheila wrote to all of the bureaux and to NACAB. From some we received an immediate encouraging response, starting with Penzance, whose manager kindly offered to put us up for the night on our way through. Others took longer to reply. Some never answered at all despite follow up letters and faxes. To my disappointment NACAB showed no interest. Sheila took on all of the tasks of CAB liaison that were considerable. There were certainly moments in the next few months when we wondered if it was worth the effort. The whole sponsorship and publicity business seemed much harder work than cycling up hill in the rain!

Eventually we had a route planned and the CAB stops scheduled. And because the visits to CAB offices would constrain where and when we need to be on the road each day, we also booked all of our B&B accommodation in advance.

John took on responsibility for the publicity material. We produced a pack of information for each CAB office, including various versions of sponsorship forms locally tailored for each of them to raise money for their office and/or to seek local press publicity. He also made a banner, a CAB logo roundel to fix to the front wheel of the tandem, and an information board to fix to the rear rack-top bag. A town name to fix to the tandem top-tube was made for each CAB destination. This material would be used for the photo stops at each bureau. For supporting material we printed cards and distance certificates, which were also customised for each bureau. We also made a sign mounted on a piece of acrylic that could be fixed to the rear rack on the bike in order to give us on-the-road publicity.

Sheila took on the thankless task of dishing out Lymington CAB sponsorship forms, that included a “guess the total distance cycled” competition, to everyone she could think of. She also personally twisted the arms of friends and relatives to pledge their sponsorship or donations.

Separately to all of the CAB fund raising, we set up a separate “guess the total distance cycled for a £1 per go” competition at work for NFDC Councillors and staff that was linked to the Chairman’s charities for the year – Wessex Cancer Trust and Honeypot Children’s Home. A site on the Council’s Intranet was created on which our daily progress could be reported.

Peter, who was a trainee advisor at Lymington CAB, volunteered to drive our car in support so as to deliver and fetch us to and from each “End”; and also to provide backup for baggage and publicity material en route. The logistics were all coming together.

On a Saturday morning we took the tandem and publicity material to the Lymington CAB office for publicity photos to be taken. The Chairman and some volunteers turned out for the photos. A photographer from the local newspaper covered the event and an article and picture were printed in the Lymington Times the following week.

The final writing out of the route notes and marking up the route on innumerable photocopied fragments of Ordnance Survey maps seemed to take for ever and we were still completing them during the week before we set off. Various route alternatives were included giving longer or shorter options to suit how we were feeling, variable weather conditions or to cope with unforeseen delays. Wherever possible our preferred route would take us along the smallest and potentially quietest and most scenic roads. That still left us with the prospect of crossing Truro, Bristol, Blackburn and Edinburgh, so we would not be short of city sights.

Lands End to John O'Groats + Orkney Tandem Tour

TOUR DIARY