Ready or Not, Here I Come!

First published in the Crack on! newsletter on 21 June:

This is a story of a middle-aged man, an old bicycle and some
very, very big mountains.

When a group of friends decided their next big adventure would be
a bike ride from London to Paris, taking in the Vosges mountains
in France, the Black Forest (more mountains) in Germany and the
Austrian and Italian Alps, I said "Me too!"

The plan was to get a suitable bike and high-tech equipment, do
lots of training and to be a super-fit, finely-tuned machine by
'the off'.

Things didn't quite work out that way. The new bike didn't
materialise, the high-tech equipment wasn't forthcoming and
training was rather limited.

In short, I wasn't really ready last September, when we set off
to catch the train for London and on to Paris.

I had put new tyres on my old, heavy mountain bike, I'd bought a
£25 tent from Amazon and some £14 panniers via eBay. My sleeping
bag was in an old £10 rucksack tied on top of the panniers.

As I say, I wasn't really ready, but the train from home, the Eurostar
and especially the rest of the team weren't going to wait - I had a
deadline and it was now or never.

So, ready or not, I had to get on with it. And get on with it I
did. Nine hundred miles and 14 days later, we were in Venice.

How? Well, we started pedalling at Notre Dame by the Seine and
stopped when we reached the Grand Canal in Venice.

For the duration of the trip I spent most of the time going in
the right direction, if not always as fast as I would have liked.

It was a fantastic trip, by the way!

I suppose I could have waited until I was really ready...

But if you spend your life waiting to be totally ready, not moving
until everything is just right and stuck where you are because you
don't have everything you 'need', you'll probably never get anywhere.

Roy