Day 12 – 16th April 2007
Today, the weather seemed to remember that it is April, and not July. We awoke to cloud and mist, although by the time we set off from Sedbergh, the mist had mostly lifted.
We knew today would be tough, with somewhere in the region of 70 miles to cover. We climbed the B road from Sedbergh and had to push the bike two or three times. We had a fine 11ses stop in Orton, but immediately on setting off I snapped one of the gear cables.
Although Rohloff and Thorn boast that it is possible to change gear whether or not you are pedalling, it is much easier to do so when you are not. With a solo bike, of course, this becomes second nature, but with a tandem, if the stoker is applying pressure to the pedal, then you meet resistance when trying to operate the twist-grip. I must communicate better when I’m intending to change down to a lower gear – changing up isn’t usually difficult because the whole point of changing up is that you want to apply more pressure.
After the cable had broken, I could still change gear after a fashion. The Very Nice Man at the Orton Post Office gave me the number of Aragon’s Bike Shop in Penrith, and after some struggling over very high fells, we descended into Shap and eventually found ourselves in Penrith, outside Aragon’s Bike Shop.
The Man set to work pretty promptly and after a call to Bridgewater to find out how a Rohloff gear works, he managed to unthread the broken cable and replace it with a new one. Annoyingly, it takes a Torque 20 tool to undo the bolts, which is pretty silly as Thorn/Rohloff do not supply such a thing as standard with the gears, and even if I had brought a spare cable with me, I would not have been able to do the job. As well as paying for the work to be done, I replaced the lost Cateye computer.
All of this, and our general sloth, held us up to the extent that Chris, who arrived in Carlisle at about 2pm, was kept hanging about until 5 before we arrived. With little further ado we set off for Annan, but rush-hour Carlisle is not my favourite place. We exchanged a few pleasantries with a Bromptoneer on the A7, but he had turned off before the horrendous roundabout at which the M6 becomes the A74.
We got around the A7/A74/M6 roundabout with few problems, but the A7 itself, and subsequently the A6071, were pretty fast, with poor surfaces. Shortly after leaving Longtown, Jan and I heard a noise to our right and looked up to see the white rump of a fallow deer disappearing amongst the trees.
We entered Scotland at around 7pm and suitable photographs were taken, but no wee drams were to be had. After that we struggled along the B721 for about 9 miles towards Annan. This was the first time in almost 600 miles that we had had the sun or the wind in our faces, and we were treated to a beautiful Solway sunset.
After showering and washing a few clothes, we went to the Star of India, which was very good and reasonably priced.