Garden centre changing room

Towns out here can be pretty small and shit so when I got up to a petrol station, a spar and a garden centre I thought I was in the middle of it so took a much needed break. I’d been drinking a lot of water but I was going to need some electrolytes after sweating. Bought a lucozade and a bottle of chocolate milk. That same guy with the route to Brighton said at the end to make sure and get a bottle of chocolate milk when you’re finished cause it has the perfect amount of something something you need to regenerate all your lost something something. Whatever he said I’m sticking with it. Good God they are delicious.

Bought a roll of cling film and a milky way too. Then I went into the garden centre next door and set up camp in the porch area between two sliding doors cause it was literally freezing outside. While there I switched my socks around, woolly on the inside to see if that makes a difference. Then I had a good load of food – a milky way, half both drinks, handfuls of peanuts and sultanas, an egg, a slice of bread and some peanut butter. I had a butter knife ready at home wrapped in cling film to butter my bread but I forgot it so I’d have to just take a bite of bread and dip my finger in the PB. Then I got to work on laying the cling film good and thick around my fingers. Then I noticed I was doing 56kph. With the sliding door constantly opening I think it messed with my speedometer so my calculations for the trip were messed up there and then. With all this standing around I’d been out in the cold 15 minutes and was beginning to feel a shiver. I rolled into town and out the other side (maybe I should have just stayed the night there cause they had a YHA) and I was definitely shivering now so got off the bike and took all my tops off and stood in the middle of town in my wrestling outfit for a minute before putting on my long sleeve running top and then everything back over that. The snow was gone though from here on. Laying on the cling film didn’t work at all so had to go back to just one layer. The chances of me making it the whole way to the coast at the start of the day were not good, now they were more like one out of a million. I was surprised with how quickly I made my mind up standing there in my wrestling shorts but with the cold and a possibility of running out of water and phone battery I definitely made the right decision. Some people just aren’t cut out for life on the road. I looked at the map and scrolled a reasonable distance to the west, saw there’s a town about 20 miles that way called Launceston and thought that sounds like as good a place as any. Plus there’s a Newport beside it, after being in The Hamptons it’ll be a J1 reunion tour. That was the aim now, 21 more miles.