Ready for Round Two

We successfully completed the London to Brighton event, and eventful it was.  For some reason, the organisers had tried to fix something that wasn't broken and created all of the bottlenecks in the world on the route, meaning it took us three hours longer than it should have to get to Brighton, which was, shall we say, less than excellent.  All of that's quite a long time ago now and I stumbled off my bike and straight back into a seemingly never-ending work, eat, don't bother to sleep cos sleeping's for wimps cycle.

Things are a little better now and I'm looking forward to Round Two - yes, this weekend it is the London to Brighton Night Ride!  It's come around very, very quickly and I'm far more excited about it than I was about the daytime version.  I have discovered that I love riding my bike at night.  Not when it happens to be dark at rush hour time, you understand (although that isn't the case at the moment), but when I have to ride home at 1 am because that's when I'm going home from work at the end of the week and I don't want to leave my bike in the City over the weekend - that's when it's lovely.  The buses are less frequent, so are not in the way.  There are far fewer cars around.  There are far fewer pedestrians around (other than in Shoreditch, which is clearly where all of the pedestrians go after dark so that they can wander around in the middle of the road, drunk or otherwise incapacitated).  It is peaceful and you can hear individual vehicles coming from miles off so you know they are there in plenty of time.  Bliss.

So, if the Night Ride conforms to my idealistic view of riding at night, then it should be a beautiful experience.  We have already received our Night Ride souvenir t-shirts.  The logo thingy on the front is sparkly - we're wondering if it's glow in the dark.

We're hoping that because we're cycling to Brighton twice, because the Night Ride is longer than the daytime event (60 miles instead of 54) and because, well, WE'RE CYCLING TO BRIGHTON AT NIGHT, you lovely folks might be persuaded to dip your hand into your pocket one more time to make a donation to British Heart Foundation - you can find our sponsorship page here.

I'll report back after the event and let you know if it lives up to my expectations!