Day 8 finitoed!

Today we had a slightly shorter distance to cover, 88 miles, taking us down into Gloucestershire. We set off at our latest time to date at 7.02am, luckily to a dry morning. We had been expecting it to be a bit rainy. We had a morning of some hilly climbs, two of which took us up to about 700ft. Compared to what we'd tackled over the last few days they weren't too bad and we made pretty good progress. We had our first stop at 1hr 30mins at about 23 miles and then again at 3hrs (45 miles). Most of the climbing was done and dusted by the time we'd reached about 30 miles and at the summit of the final big climb we had a spectacular clear view over all the hills and trees below. We wound our way down towards Worcester along pretty easy roads, where we stopped in the town centre for a bit of shopping! Pete's camera, which we were using to film the ride on, had run out of memory so we had to get a new memory stick. Whilst i was waiting for Pete outside the shop a man came up to me and offered to sponsor us! He'd read the sign on my back! At first i thought he was one of those annoying people who try and sign you up for stuff!! We also needed a new bottle cage and bottle and some energy gels from the local bike shop but had a few issues finding it, ending up taking a road out of Worcester before realising it was back in town! So we had to double back the last mile or so before we eventually found it! Once we got on our way again it was about half 11 and we still had about 38 miles to cover. We travelled down into Gloucestershire and through Gloucester which seemed like a dump!! I'd always imagined it to be quite a nice area (maybe from the children's nursery rhymes) but everywhere seemed really run down. The last few miles dragged quite a bit as we were getting very tired and having to stop more frequently. It was spitting with rain for much of the last 30 miles but it never got too heavy and was quite refreshing. We eventually hit the small village of Cambridge (no not the 'Oxford and Cambridge' Cambridge!!) at about 14.50 and we stopped at The George pub about 2 miles from the campsite. We thought we'd have a nice pub lunch before toodling down the road to the campsite! We both filled up on garlic bread, curry and some cider! I was so full by the time we left I really did just have to roll the bike to get down to the campsite!! We arrived to find Pete's parents with the campervan and quickly passed out on the grass!! It was about half 4 by this time and we were shattered!! The rain started getting up a bit so we quickly put up camp before relaxing with a cup of tea! In total we had covered 90.3miles due to our bike shop diversions! We'd averaged about 14.3mph. 

Tomorrow is looking to be a hard day as we've got over 97 miles to cover in the rain :o( Not quite looking forward to it at the mo!!