Days 6-10: St. Braivels to Knighton, then Chester, Slaidburn, Penrith, and Carlisle

Eek, I seem to be running out of time. You can see our route above, and I'll tell you about these days when I've got more time. By the time we get North of Manchester, we're really starting to feel that this ride is achieveable, but this all changes on Monday in Carlisle, about 10 miles from finally entering Scotland.

As Al is waiting at the exit of a roundabout in Carlisle, a motorist goes straight into the back of his bike and sends him up into the air. The police and an ambulance are quickly on the scene, but most of the rest of the day is spent in hospital. Fortunately the diagnosis is only bad bruising on his back, which seems barely believeable having watched him put on a board and stretchered into the back of an ambulance.

We don't have many options to extend the ride - our accommodation and train tickets are all booked ahead. A fairly fraught discussion of what to do follows, and we decide that we'll have to stay in Carlisle for the night. Al wants to continue the ride (although he is on a large amount of pain killers at this point...), but we don't know if he'll be able to, or if his bike will, and we've lost a day.

My parents are on holiday in Onich, as they are due to meet us in John O'Groats, and are able to come down to pick us and our bikes up on Tuesday from Carlisle. A fairly miserable car ride follows, watching the different places we'd planned to cycle through pass us by, and now knowing whether we can or want to continue. It seems a bit pointless all of a sudden.

I'm writing this from Onich, where we've spent the day, and been for a walk. We were due to arrive in Onich tonight, and at the moment Al is starting to feel better and wants to continue the ride, so I suspect we'll be back on the road tomorrow for three more days and about 200 miles. If we do, I'm not sure how this will leave my feelings about the ride - we won't have cycled the whole way, through the lack of concentration of one person.

This ride has, in terms of the combination of the demands it has made in physical terms, and the concentration, energy, and stress, probably been the hardest thing I've ever done. We've already done nearly 700 miles, and that should feel like an achievement. But at the moment it feels like a failure, and I'm not sure I could bring myself to start it again. Of course, there are more important things in life, and we're both alive and well. But right now it feels hard to find that perspective.