Today after adding up last weeks fund raising, has meant that we have hit another milestone.We are 1/3rd of the way to reaching the total. Amazing! Thank you to all who have helped us to get this far.
The large jump has been mostly thanks to the proceeds from the dog show last weekend and a donation in exchange for first aid services at a football tournament. Its so good to see it adding up. However we have also had a fairly huge set back recently.....
The BHF for some strange reason (can't think why) have not found enough people crazy enough to sign up to this ride. I suspect it has alot to do with the minimum sponsorship amount being so high. £6000 is a huge amount (unless you work in investment banking of course). Its almost impossible to train adequately and raise this amount of money as we are discovering. Free time...? what's that? So I received an email recently confirming their decision to postpone the ride to a date in the future. No date confirmed. Well that left us with a dilemma, do we postpone to a currently indefinite date or continue as planned and ride it independently?
Having committed mentally and physically to the ride I wasn't about to just wipe it from Septembers calendar and Paul felt the same. In some ways we have a degree of relief. Without the BHF organisation we are set to plan and run the whole ride ourselves. Slightly daunting in terms of time left to do this but we are confident we can do so with some help from the BHF on the route planned. As an independet event we won't have to raise the exact £12,000 total. As much as we we would like to do so if we are to be busy planning the trip now we will have to sacrifice some fund raising time to trip planning and execution. We plan to continue with all of the events currently planned and then we shall focus on the training and ride planning.
There were other riders and friends who would have liked to have joined the ride but for whatever reason felt they couldnt because of the commitment to raise £6,000. Now that barrier is lifted we have been able to invite others to join us either for some or all of the ride and if they can raise any funds then great but the obligation is not there and we would love to have some company...not to mention some other wheels to sit behind for a spell each day.
Jeff Cleminson, Chris Vaughan are already committed. Excellent! :-) with numerous others who will join for some of the ride (mainly in France). So now is your chance, want to come along?
We also need to find ourselves some support drivers. Gosh this is the difficult bit. Who wants to give up leave to do that? I am sure there must be someone as crazy as us interested in helping out so if its you, please get in touch. I am sure the party at the end will be a good one.
We shall overcome....! I am still really excited about the trip and know that we can do this, where there is a will there is a way.
On a good note my beautiful Bianchi road bike has just returned from Argos Cycles in Bristol where its been for a respray. Look at this work of art....
How cool is that? So Sunday is ear marked as a day to rebuild it with my new Apex Group set. I should have more gears then than I can shake a large stick at. Currently my commuting bike is wearing out and I have been riding on only 8 gears. Ditchling Beacon here I come....!
Training is increasing and I am beginning to feel the effects too. Weight is dropping (slowly) and commute times to work are also dropping so something is working.
Anyway must go, we have a car boot sale this morning to attend and see if we can rattle a few more pennies into the can and make some space in this very cramped flat.
Have a good weekend all.
