That's one LOOOONG cycle!

At the time of writing this, I am extremely frustrated, but I just had to write this to share. 

I had this lovely motivational idea of plotting my entire (draft) cycle route for Lands End to John O' Groats on AA road maps, then sticking all the pages together in a long line. The idea was to be able to stick the entire route on my staircase wall for five reasons: 

• A visual reminder that "ohmygoodnessthisisreallyhappening!" - I need constant motivation.
• A reminder to get out and do my training because some of the hills on this cycle are going to be a LOT bigger than what I'll be used to from my Kent cycling
• A way to draft routes - add different routes in different coloured highlighters 
• Could add post it notes for points of interest for Will, my bf and support driver, to visit along the way
• Adding places to stay and other relevant notes. 

Firstly - why is there not a ready made map available of this section of the UK? Wouldn't it be nice if I could walk into Waterstones and buy a map of "End2End"? But no. Not available. So I thought I'd take matters into my own hands with AA maps. 

Anyway... so I managed to plot on a route, taken from the Cicerone Guide by Nick Mitchell. He has broken his route down into 14 sections or days, but I am aiming for 8 or 9 days, so the route will probably need some adapting anyway. It was good as a starting point for the first steps in planning, though. 

I then copied the route into an identical AA map, and then cut it all out, lined up the route and stuck it all together. 

The end result was about 5 metres of map.

That was all fine. 

Then. THEN. Then I had to recruit Will to help me to stick the map up the staircase wall. But the cello tape wouldn't stick and neither would blue tac. When I finally started sticking the map to the wall with climbing tape, we realised that the entire map was at the WRONG ANGLE and therefore would not fit. 

After another few attempts, and a minor tantrum where I swore and almost ripped the whole damn thing apart, we decided to have a break until the morning.

Will spent some time peeling the cello tape off the map so we could start a fresh with it tomorrow. 

I very much hope that we work out how to stick the map up in the morning...

This entire exercise has, however, taught me one important thing: 

This is going to be a LOOOOONG cycle! Eeek! 

Thank you for reading - a problem shared is a problem halved and all that! :)