Day 5 - Shap Fell

Firstly an apology about Glympse not working this afternoon but as you will see below the weather wasn't conducive to powering up the laptop. 

Ride Stats: 93 miles, 4,882 feet of climbing, total time 8 hrs 6 mins, riding time 6 hrs 51 mins. 

Thanks Guys

We woke to a very windy and showery start to the day and after a breakfast of that old reliable cycling fuel porridge, retrieved the bikes from the shed. Having said our goodbyes to our hosts Gill and Nick and friends in Lancaster we started pedalling and were immediately drenched by a huge downpour - this is a particularly common feature of Lake District weather.

We headed out of Lancaster and on towards Kendall about 20 miles away, a very pretty town but also the precursor to the big challenge of the day for us, Shap Fell.  This particular climb features prominently in all of the LEJOG blogs we have read and is a long climb of 1,400 feet in about 9 miles. Fortunately we had the wind in our favour today but due to the cloud and rain the views we had been hoping to see we're denied to us which was a shame.
Reaching the summit without getting wet was a major achievement but we were soon put in our place as no sooner than we started the descent the heavens opened and we ended up cycling through a temporary monsoon.  This was a real shame as we were hoping to record some record speeds -instead we looked like drowned rats when we met the girls just the other side of the town Shap.   

Looking back to Shap

Julie and Joy refuelled us with a lovely home made fruit cake from a farmers shop and then went on ahead to meet up with Vince's cousin Les Weller and his wife Jill at Gretna. Les was driving 60 miles to come and ride the last section in to Lockerbie with us.

We meanwhile continued on towards Penrith where we came across Caroline and Phil of "Panda on a bike" (see Day 1 post). They are doing LEJOG in 8 days and have suffered a few setbacks en route but are just riding on through it.  It's the last day we will see them as they are going up the east side of Scotland tomorrow - good luck guys.

We reached Gretna and the welcoming faces of Les, Jill, Joy and Julie on the border with Scotland and posed for the Scotland Welcomes You photo.  Robin had warned us last night that we would be ok with the border guards but that the customs officials may be suspicious of the amount of cream we were smuggling in our luggage (oops rule 5 has forced us to cease this paragraph). 

Les leads the way

Les wanted to come and join us for the last 17 miles on his trusty mountain bike which was a great gesture to his cousin Vince - yet again we have had our day lifted by being supported on the ride.  This provided Jeff and Ian with a great chance to get to know Les and swap stories about Vince.  We are sure that Vince has been helping us with the favourable weather so far and were amused that he had obviously decided this was a great time to let the heavens open again to let us know he was watching.  We miss you mate.

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