I enjoyed yet another excellent restful nights sleep, awake before my alarm was due to wake me up allowing me some time to ease my way into the morning. Showered and dressed I made my way down to the buffet breakfast. From the calm of floor 2 where my room was I stumbled into a large room full of fellow hotel guests!

I was lucky to find a table to then enjoy my breakfast, not quite the previous quality B & B offerings but not a bad start to the day. I was joined by a large group of Germans, with an accompaniment of Americans all of us trying to pick our breakfast of choice. After eating lots of calories on previous days on the bike had become habit the train journey and short cycle to the station / from the station home didn't really justify a big cooked brekkie, so I kept the cooked brekkie smaller than normal.

Back to my room I was soon packed, checked out (with Red collected and loaded up - thanks Hotel reception team for looking after her) I set up Sat Nav to guide me across the city centre to the train station.

The plan was simple for the day - first train from Liverpool down to Wolverhampton, then a quick change to another train to get me all the way down to Bournemouth. This was only the second or third time I'd booked Red and I onto a train (trainline very clear that I needed to book a bike space, and given previous experiences I was also keen to ensure I was able to sit close to my bike for security reasons if nothing else.

First train had no bookable bike spaces as an option.....so with the guidance of the train guard I got on with Red into a nearly empty carriage , settled down into an empty seat and looked to enjoy the journey southwards to Wolverhampton.

This first leg of the journey allowed me to enjoy the sport of "people watching" with a lovely selection of people also using the train for their travel, including a lovely young lad who clearly had no intention of buying a ticket, a large family group who did the same.....in fact lots of people trying to get on the train without a ticket giving all three train guards with the challenge of trying to sell tickets / issue fines and keep control of the train!

On arrival at Wolverhampton Red and I stepped off the train, found a place to sit down and wait patiently for the second train......which turned up slightly late and very much overbooked!!!

Red had a booked place which I found and placed her in safely, but on trying to find my own booked seat I found it occupied. In fact every part of the train appeared to be filled with passengers which after 610 miles of cycling and the thought of a four hour train journey to undertake all the way to Bournemouth was not the greatest situation to find myself in!

So to avoid hassle I decided to go back to where Red was hanging up and spend time in this part of the carriage, close to the doors, until a few passengers left to hopefully find somewhere to sit down.

Station after station we stopped at allowed a handful of passengers to leave, a similar number to get onboard and no real change to the general level of congestion on the train. I resigned myself to sitting on the floor close to Red, and over the course of the next few hours became a deputy guard / customer care champion helping people on and off the train with their luggage, directing people to the toilet / cafe / correct carriage and learning the route we were taking as we continued south.

To cut a long train journey story short (not sure it could make that interesting a blog) after almost four hours on this second train we arrived in Bournemouth where Red and I managed to get off the train, out of the station and set off to cycle the last eight miles home.

This last part of the journey was a very familiar route - essentially the last part of my adventure on Red the bike was my commute home. After all the joys of Sat Nav guiding me along the way, with the occasional directional blip (sorry Sat Nav) these last few miles were essentially cycled in some form of auto pilot.

With this being the case I had a good 40 minutes or so to start to process the adventure I was close to finishing. Clearly 40 minutes wasn't going to be sufficient time to do this properly, but I kept coming back to the realisation that the biggest take away from 620 miles on the bike was the ability to enjoy the experience because I had time to do so.

I have a great life, a loving wife and family, a good job.....but a constant feeling of being on some form of treadmill plays on my mind almost all the time. Eight full days on the bike with only an evening destination to get to as a focus allowed me to enjoy almost every moment on the bike, and plenty of time off the bike....and not just eating flapjack or drinking Irn Bru (although I'm sure I have eaten lots of flapjack and drunk a few litres of Scotland's finest soft drink ).

Seeing seals basking in the sunshine at Loch Fleet, getting to John O'Groats and seeing the Orkney Isles, cycling up and down several mountains, not getting a puncture (to date over 7500 miles without a puncture so far!!!) , seeing so much wildlife along the way, only getting rained on for about ten minutes through the entire adventure......are just some of the immediate highlights I was able to consider on my cycle home.

Within no time at all I arrived, welcomed by a long, warm, enveloping hug from Jan, a bark / tail wag / lick from Archie dog and a chance to say I had finished.

619.7 miles cycled, 27292 feet climbed (or 8318.6 metres, or 5.17 miles ...whichever sounds more impressive!!!) and in excess of 36,000 calories consumed are all ways of quantifying the journey I had completed, but it will take an entire blog after several weeks of reflection to begin to quantify how amazing this cycle has been......

.....for the time being however since my return at the end of June I have only undertaken the cycle to and from work. Maybe I've got some form of adventure out of my system, more likely work and life has been flat out busy, but with a non-cycling holiday with Jan on the horizon I'm sure I'll find a few more cycling challenges to undertake over the rest of 2023, giving myself plenty to share via these blogs.