smith4188 wrote:You up for it?
I’m not, and there’s no need to wait till May to consider that definite! Bladderwrack?
However, I’ll cheer you on from the comfort of my armchair. And I’ll buy a book if you write one about it, assuming you don’t starve to death by about Milford Haven.
I hope this eggs you on (and think it might or I wouldn’t say it), but I would write this trip off as doomed to failure if you didn’t have a track record of some sort.
Your £1 a day idea is good: it will be crucial to boost calories, it may fix an unforeseen problem or two along the way, and it even has some marketing value. But to state the obvious, there will be many things competing for that £1. Some of them will cost about 20 quid.
One thing that hasn’t been talked about much is how you intend to deal with frayed nerves when the going gets tough. Many adventures I’ve read about take a bad turn when people disagree about a course of action. (A harrowing example: the Donner Party. Worth reading if you’re not familiar with it.) The more people you have involved, the harder it will be to deal with the politics of it all and the greater the risk of a serious falling out.
And people will probably drop out along the way, assuming you do muster a decent group at the starting line. Unlike the Donner Party, members of your party will be able to drop out by making a phone call. That will be a huge temptation after days of hunger, some sickness, ailments caused by or imagined to be caused by an unbalanced diet, the odd cycling injury, harassment by authorities or meddlers, etc. Over 100 days, people will find lots of reasons why they can’t possibly continue; that’s ample time for some sort of family crisis to develop back home, for example. And that’s fine. It’s hugely admirable to try at all. But losing a member may critically unsettle the dynamics of the remaining group. Are the people signing up aware that their dropping out would affect the others in ways that are hard to predict at the outset?
On top of all this (and more, I’m sure) you face a cycling challenge that would be non-trivial while dining and resting in fine B&Bs along the route. A hearty, hot meal makes a world of difference to my morale. I mean, it just transforms my outlook on life in half an hour. I know I wouldn’t mentally cope for 100 days without roughly 100 of those. Not unless my life depended on it.
“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.” So said Hemingway about food, and I think it applies even more to hot food after a day of cycling.
As I said, your plan is audacious. I hope you get to Gibraltar. But if not, you’ll undoubtedly have inspired a bunch of onlookers in trying.
Here’s hoping for a brief total collapse of the euro around mid-July!