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Rotary
Cycle Down The Rhine
June
14th - 30th, 2008
Rotary Club of Romsey Test District 1110
Total raised for charity = £7,000
A tremendous thankyou to all of our sponsors.
Graham Lee and I (Bill Gidley) are both members of the Rotary Club of Romsey Test. Both of us enjoy taking part in Rotary Club cycle rides but in recent years I have found that my deteriorating eyesight has made solo riding on unknown roads more difficult. So now I am reduced to being the mere engine on a tandem! ... well thankfully it's a lot more fun than that ... some of the time anyway!
The "Down the Rhine" trip was our second major expedition on the tandem. In 2006 we cycled from Lands End to John O'Groats. The story of that ride can be found by clicking the LE-JOG page. On the Lands End to John O'Groats ride we also raised over £7,000 which makes our grand total just over £14,000 for charity. It's an achievement of which we are very proud.
The Lands End to John O'Groats ride was enormous fun. If you cycle seriously, it is a must-do ride and seeing the UK in that way is simply fantastic. For all sorts of reasons, the Rhine ride was somehow much more grueling although the cycling was in general far less physically demanding. I guess in a nutshell Switzerland was beautiful but the latter part of the ride through Germany and Holland was far less scenic and generally not terribly inspiring. Also we had some major mechanical problems which at times made it very unclear if we could complete the ride. For the full story with photos see the blog. The blog of course starts at the end and works backwards.
For some talks that we gave we put together some pictures plus music to represent the ride in double quick time. I hope that you enjoy them:
Lands End to John O'Groats in 2.5 minutes
Down the Rhine in about 5 minutes
Finally again a very big thankyou to all of our sponsors. Although the rides were fun making them sponsored rides did add another dimension and spur us on to ensure that we finished. This was particularly true of "Down the Rhine" when mechanical problems struck. Also a very big thankyou to the SPOT company who kindly loaned us a GPS tracker unit which allowed people to follow our progress.
If you want to know anything further about these rides email to "bill dot gidley at sky dot com"
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SPOT is a low cost GPS
tracking and emergency beacon system click here
to find out more about it. |
