Shetland Journal

Journal Part 5 & 6

Tuesday 4th August

Two more punctures and a ripped tyre, although this time it was my bike that suffered from two tyre malfunctions within the hour. Very stressful. Stopped at Whitchurch, 20 miles south of Chester and bought yet more spares. Cannot believe how many tyres we are getting through already. The guy in the bike shopped promised that the expensive spare tyre I bought today would be more robust. Let's hope so. On the bright side we are getting good at changing tyres now.

We arrived at Chester during the rush hour and had to negotiate our way around very busy junctions in the city before finding the Youth Hostel about 6 pm. We headed straight for the showers. It has been a long hot slog today. 86 miles today bringing our total to around 460. We could have been over half way there if we had chosen a more direct route. Quite a sobering thought, but we are still enjoying it so far. Chester Youth Hostel is a huge quaint building with large dormitories. Just hope the bed is comfortable, although to be honest we could sleep on a park bench and it would feel like luxury. We went out to an Indian restaurant which was brilliant.

We were interviewed by BBC Radio Shetland, who wanted to hear how we were getting on and SIBC have mentioned our trek as well. It is as close to being a celebrity as I'll ever get! We had a great view of a church from our room.

church

We weren't the only slow moving traffic on the roads.

Wednesday 5th August

We drove through 3 busy cities, Chester, Bolton and Blackburn and it seemed like it was always during the rush hour. Not much fun, especially for Malcolm, who is not really used to dealing with such large numbers of cars, nor the busy junctions that we had to negotiate. Although to be honest, I'm not used to being in such traffic on a bike. Would feel much safer in my old Toyota. Still we made it through in one piece and thankfully without any puntures today. We made our way to the Youth Hostel at Slaidburn which was at the end of a long single track road over the fells. It was hard going. We found out we didn't get a signal on our mobiles either which made contact with families a bit difficult. (Hence the late posting).

There were two older women at the youth hostel, both in their 90's but obviously considered themselves still youthful enough. One of them was very entertaining and told us about the youth hostels she had stayed in over the last few decades. The other one moaned about everything, it was very funny.