LEJOG Day 5 – Whitchurch – Hale
Miles 103 | climbing 3168 | 8 hours 29 minutes
Something really rather wonderful happened at the beginning of day 5. We made our way back to the drop off point from the night before to find the road closed for resurfacing. Insistent that we stuck to our ‘every inch’ rule we approached the team to explain, who kindly let us through the roadblock so that we could start in exactly the same place.
Making final preparations (or as Nick and Roshan would probably say ‘whilst I was faffing about’!) the boss of the roadwork team – Mac – approached us, we thought to ask us to get on with it. Instead, he asked us once again what we were doing before going back to his team whilst we finished getting ready. We were just about to leave when the boss returned; we assumed this was definitely going to be the ‘get a move on’ request.
Instead, he handed us some money. His team had a whip round and we were very touched that people that had never met us, our friend, and knew nothing about the charity we were collecting for, had felt compelled to donate to our cause.
Drama was to ensue as we took a backroad route, ignoring the ‘road closed ahead’ signs for 10 miles or so. Surely that wouldn’t apply to bikes? Yes, it did. It was a bridge across a river that was closed. Backtracking would of added a huge number of miles to the day. We asked a local farmer in his tractor who told us we had no choice other than to retrace our route (we gave him a not too flattering nickname later in the day) but then we had some more friendly advice to redirect us down the Llangollen canal towpath which would avoid the re-route – see the GPS track and you can see how far this avoided us going. Canal tow paths are less than ideal on road bikes with tyres at 100psi but a lot better than the alternative.
We knew that the rest of the day was not going to be particularly pleasant as there were very busy sections to negotiate as to get across the M56 and M62 corridors so we were pleased to reach our destination where we parked up in a holiday park for the night. We recounted our story to several people in the bar that night and twice I was told by two different people that it was a lovely thing to be doing with my dad. They meant Roshan, which we had a laugh about, and ‘Dad’ it was for the rest of the trip.