After a cracking weekend of time trialling, it was only a hop, step and a jump away from setting off from home for the town of Ennis, Co. Clare, Ireland for the 2013 of Ras na m'Ban.
My plan was to get me and all my stuff to Steve's straight after work on Monday. This duly happened according to plan, as did dinner and car packing. We even managed to fit everything in. Steve then mentioned the critical 'P' word - passport. Passport, no I definitely hadn't picked that up. Whilst Steve assured me I wouldn't need it for the ferry, I am flying home on Sunday and I knew I certainly wouldn't get through the airport without it, so before we'd even set off we had a 30min detour to make!
Having made it to Horsham and passport duly picked up, we set back off on our route to Fishguard. We were solely reliant on satnav as Steve had buried the road atlas deep in the boot, and things just didn't seem right, as although we were speeding along, our eta was going up not down! Quick check of the settings and we discovered it was avoiding toll roads (and therefore the Severn bridge). At the same time I reset the satnav from just going to 'Fishguard' to the postcode that we had received in a text message. Excellent, eta dropped to 1:20 and all sorted... Or so we thought.
So, across the Severn bridge, along the m4 to Cardiff, and even the turnoff onto the a470 seemed normal. Nicola (Soden) texted to say she had arrived and we still had an eta of 1:20. Then, the satnav took us further and further into the depths of welsh narrow bendy roads and the gut feeling that something was wrong grew and grew, but I was too tired to care as I knew I had programmed the satnav and it MUST be taking us to the right place. Then at just after 1:20 we pulled up to the port, at Aberaeron, approximately 40 miles north of where we should have been! What? How had that happened? Had the ferry company given us the wrong postcode? No, I had inadvertently managed to transpose the 4 and the 6 of the postcode, typing in 46 not 64. At the same time, the low fuel light had come on, and at the spooking hour in Wales no petrol stations were open.
So, the challenge ahead of us - drive 40miles on windy roads with 40 miles worth of diesel in 30 minutes. Impossible? You would have thought so, but our saviour Nicola was waiting in the wings. Whilst we we driving as quickly as possible without burning fuel (or in other words not very fast), Nicola was working her magic with the staff at the ferry port, persuading them to wait for us. Our eta started at 2:26 (ferry departure at 2:45), but was hampered further by the longest pee in history (that couldn't even be finished for need of getting back in the car) and the mirage of a 24hr tesco petrol station appearing in the distance, that slipped to 2:30. Nicola was back on the phone again, saying that we HAD to be there by 2:20 otherwise they would have to close the gate, but that she was going to get all her stuff out of her car ready to jump in when we arrived.
Come on, come on we are going to make it. With all the texts from Nicola I actually started to believe we were going to make it. The particularly narrow windy roads through Fishguard were interesting, and suddenly 7mins became 2mins and we were there. Nicola dashed out of the building with the nice stena line lady who had already booked us in, bags got chucked in the car then we motor paced Nicola on her bike down to the boat. As Steve said 'mother puss bucket we actually made it!'
Iona at Peterborough Crit
