Into the Land of Opportunity...

We had a difficult time getting from Taunton up to the border yesterday.  The gradients have levelled out so we should have been making good time but Rachy has picked up a niggle on her knee and it seemed to be getting progressively worse through out the day.  More on that later.  First off we cycled up to Bridgewater, where at Morrisions we met another group of end to enders heading the opposite way to us.  Then onto Bristol, where we’d decided to cross the river Avon as we weren’t at all sure if we could cycle on the Avon mouth Bridge (which you can it turns out).  But the route through Bristol was not too bad for so large a city and we were soon back out on the cyclepath that follows that road to Avonmouth.  The worst part of the day was negotiating the road filled with heavy goods vehicles that ran up to the old Severn bridge.

On the old Severn bridge

I'm sure you'll all appreciate the quality of this camera work... but we are just entering Wales

Light Traffic on the main roads...

... and even less on the tow paths

We stayed in the centre of Chepstow for the evening where we got the help of a professional fundraiser  during our evening outing to the pub.  He came in the shape my mate’s 2 and a bit year old.  Who was certainly a lot more effective at getting people to open their wallets in 5 minutes than we have been in the previous 3 days.

When we woke up, Rachel’s knee was worse than ever, so after some experimental cycling around tesco car park she decided it would be best to rest it for a few days.  So we waived her off at the station and headed off towards Built Wells.  After a few initial false starts at getting out of Chepstow following the cycle routes we managed to make it quite quickly to Abergavenny, from where we picked up a canal as far as Crickhowell in time for a latish lunch.  Then, it was onto the fast main road as far as Builth. We are both feeling quite tired now.  Looking forward to reaching Llanberis for our climb at Snowdon and then maybe a day off.