We left the hotel in Bewdley at 8.30am to find a bicycle shop in Kidderminster which is called Spokes to get my bike back in working condition. When we got there just before 9am, it was already open and a hive of activity. Within 20 minutes the very helpful chap with all the right tools and skills, had the gears changing perfectly again and we set off back to the village of Hartlebury where I had come to an abrupt halt the night before.

It was a gloriously warm summer day and the section from Hartlebury back to Bewdley was along a former railway line and then a canal and was really pleasant cycling. Beyond Bewdley, long sections of the route were also off-road through idyllic forests and along the River Severn Valley. The weather was glorious and the cycling very enjoyable but sections of the route were tremendously slow going because they were either on rough, uphill forestry road or needed you to get off and push the bike up steep, gravel paths. If you were young and fit and on a mountain bike, you might well have made better progress but neither of these circumstances apply to me. Pushing a bike at about 2 mph slows your overall progress greatly and it was about 1.30 before I got to my lunch rendezvous with Helen in Bridgenorth having covered only about 20 miles.

Bridgenorth is a pretty town that was bustling with tourists and we had lunch in the garden of a pub beside the river from where you could see the funicular railway taking passengers to the top of the cliff on the other side of the river. After lunch I set off at about 2.30 with about 45 miles to cycle to get to our overnight stop in Market Drayton.

The first section of the route was again off-road on a former railway line with a gravel surface which gradually rose to about 500 feet at the town of Telford which was once at the heart of the industrial revolution. It is now a sprawl of modern urban development and the route winds its way torturously through it avoiding main roads and motorways on traffic free cycle paths. From Telford onwards the route is on paved cycle paths beside roads initially and then later on country lanes so progress was quite good but it was 7.30 in the evening before I reached our hotel in Market Drayton or more correctly about a mile outside it.

The distance covered was 66 miles with about 3,000 feet of ascent and I had been on the bike or pushing it for about 8 hours.