Setting the Scene.

Any good film, play or book usually starts with a scene setting, so to keep up with the Jones’s, so will I.

So here I am, at the age of 37 training like a mad man to become the first person, along with my expedition partner John Wilton-Davies, to walk from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. The last person to get anywhere near close to completing the expedition was Captain Robert Falcon Scott who, along with his team, died in the attempt nearly a century ago on the ill-fated Terra Nova expedition.

For nearly two years we’ve worked seven days a week, up to eighteen hours a day pulling together the expedition and the projects surrounding it. As well as the expedition itself, John and I want to raise a massive sum for a charity, work with our chosen charity to increase awareness of their work, and we have our own baby called the ‘Great Heart Challenge’ which is, to put in as concisely as possible, a national health and fitness initiative for schools.

I haven’t had a day off; not one.

The workload and pressure has been heavy and I needed a break from the monotony of work. And I needed to spend some good quality time with a few friends for some fun and rejuvenation but I couldn’t afford to slack off training and take a non-active lager-swilling, fried breakfast eating beach holiday in Ibiza – or anywhere similar. I’m lucky in that most of my friends, or many of my friends, or actually a few of my friends are quite active, so I came up with a plan.

I spoke with a teacher friend on the ‘phone. The person, who I don’t really want to name so we’ll just call him Craig Cullen, was all fired up when I said ‘let’s do a road trip to Paris – by bike’. He agreed. I called back four hours later to tell him the good news that the trip was on. He suddenly became very quiet. Apparently a ‘wedding-tackle’ crunching bike ride across France wasn’t quite as appealing as a week in Spain with the guys or a few days lovingly carrying shopping bags and applying sun cream for his girlfriend, and my offer of allowing him to apply my sun cream apparently wasn’t quite as attractive an option.. I’d been dumped.

Having already told a few people of my intentions I suddenly found it very difficult to back out of my very rough plans. After all, how can a chap about to head off to the South Pole cry off because he feels lonely?

The Children’s Trust is a very worthwhile charity which works with kids who have suffered brain injuries, so without too much trouble I’d already decided that any charitable value to the trip should be directed to them

The ‘Just for the ride, Paris’ ride was also to be used to add in to our Great Heart Challenge programme to give schools and kids a flavour for the sort of thing they could achieve with a little effort.

Now the big problem – the bike. I had a bike; ‘Ratalie’ is a rather used, abused and very tired looking mountain bike (in the ‘traditional form without any of this new fangled suspension rubbish) which sometimes refuses to stop no matter how hard I yank on the break levers and often decides to turn in to an automatic and change gears of her own accord. There was no way she’d make it to Paris.

Cycle Around, a Trowbridge based bike shop came to the rescue when they sponsored me a superb Claud Butler bike. The new bike, called ‘Natalie’, had a brushed aluminium finish, had a suspension seat post, easily switchable suspension forks, 27 gears, narrow wheels, and above all, she was beautiful to ride. The trip was now definitely on.

The day I left for London, Terry and Jenny of the Family Adventure Store asked ‘Have you got your route all planned out?’ A pause. ‘Just, you do have a route?’. Another pause. ‘Just, do you even have a map?’. A very sheepish ‘Not yet’ was mumbled as I fussed over my wash kit.