LEJOG Day 4 – Chepstow – Whitchurch
Miles 112 | climbing 4889 ft | 10 hours 2 minutes
Today would take a due north route (great for the mind!) almost the length of the Welsh border to the Cheshire town of Whitchurch, just south of Chester. We left our accommodation and returned near to the spot where we’d been picked up the night before and set off. Roshan wasn’t quite sure what we were doing when we set off in the wrong direction only to return a minute or two later. Our drop off the night before had been 100 yards or so in the other direction so of course we had to go back there to start the day proper. We needed to get to John O’Groats in the knowledge that we had cycled every single inch of the way so this was important to us. There was a big climb out of Chepstow as we followed the beautiful Wye Valley, and made good progress until a bang from my back wheel as I broke a spoke. A call to Roshan to let him know the problem and he was on the case with finding the closest bike shop on our route which turned out to be a good 20 miles on in Hereford. We continued, but I was very cautious particularly on the descents – with a spoke gone the others were under more pressure and a wheel collapse wouldn’t be good.
We continued gingerly into Hereford and found the bike shop (hence the slightly messy GPS trail through the town) who didn’t have the correct spokes so a new wheel was fitted and we were off again and finished the day in Whitchurch pleased to of got over what ended up being our only mechanical failure of the whole trip; neither of us even had a single puncture.