Bewdley to The Alps - The Plan

Bewdley to The Alps - The Plan

Starting tomorrow morning (Saturday) the Three Heads will Roll.  The three in question are myself, Kevin Bailey and Paul Roper, all retired head teachers (though Kevin unconvincingly claims to still be doing some vague sort of work!) and the plan is to cycle from our home town of Bewdley to the ski resort of Samoens in south-east France, a distance of about 600 miles.
Some friends of ours, Simon and Derval Jenkins, own a house there and that is our target.

Tomorrow we are cycling to Oxford University, not for study, but to use one of their empty halls of residence as our first B&B.  This will be about 75 miles, with a similar distance on Day 2 to take us to Portsmouth in time for the overnight ferry to Caen.  From there we will cycle between 40 and 75 miles per day through France in a generally south-easterly direction, with one rest day in the Jura Mountains.  Once we reach Lake Geneva at Lausanne we will take a ferry to Evian then cycle south on a very hilly stretch through Morzine and onwards to Samoens, a tough final day!

Our return will be by overnight coach from Lyons on September 7th.  This will drop us at Northampton Services on the M1 on Monday 8th, from where we will cycle to the station and take the train back home - well that's the plan anyway!

Although we are doing it for fun I have invited anyone who is interested to sponsor me for the ride, with all proceeds (including Gift Aid) going to the work I am involved in to develop and improve services for deaf children and adults in The Gambia.  Details of this can be found on our website www.gambiandeafchildren.com .
Should you be so inclined you can still make a contribution via the Virgin Giving site, the address of which is: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/charities/GambianDeafChildrenSupportProject
My target is £1000 and I am nearly there already so I will have to finish the ride now - no pressure!

I haven't used a blog for over twelve months so it will be steep learning curve once again to remember how to do it,  so please bear with me.  I hope you will find it of some interest, and comments back are always welcome when en route (though I think you may need your own Google account to do so).  Thanks for even reading this far!

Malcolm Garner
Fri 22/08/14