RNLI Fundraising trip
Round the Coastline of Britain

Day 1 - 12th May 2005
Leaving Henley (72 miles) then Calshot to Margate (281 miles)
Visited 17 RNLI Stations

The evening before, Chris and I took a couple of photo's outside my local watering hole, The Unicorn, Kingwood Common. The pub regulars have all been extremely supportive about the trip and have donated large amounts of money to the RNLI "Train a Hero" fund.

Then it was time to test out my "loaner" BMW Navigator II GPS and the Autocom I had just fitted. This was a baptism of fire for the GPS, as I had only got it working with the planned routes a couple of days before. Luckily, Chris has had a Nav II for some time and I felt that if I did experience any problems with my unit, at least we had his as backup. We called up the waypoint for a YHA in the New Forest and off we went.

It had been a lovely day and the evening stayed fine as we cruised down some back roads to meet the A34 at Whitchurch, then joined up with the M3, where we saw the first 1200GS of our journey. Soon enough we were into the New Forest and pootling down some lovely roads glibly following the instructions from the GPS units. After a while were told to "turn left and your destination will be on the left." Well, this took us straight across a golf club carpark, out the other side which had a no access sign and up a rutted track.

Astonishingly, a couple of hundred yards up the track and well into the woods the YHA appeared on our left. The GPS's passed their first test.

The YHA was just brilliant. A lovely large house and three teepees in the grounds. A good meal at the inn just down the lane and it was off to bed for an early start.

David Griffiths (my area RNLI man) met us down at Calshot at 7.30am on the dot for the first pictures of us and the bikes in front of an RNLI station. The weather was already very windy but with a nice blue sky. After a few pictures and a final handshake, the journey proper started.

I had reckoned on this day being about the hardest we were going to have to do. There were 17 stations to visit and we were going to be fighting our way through the South Coast traffic as well as a strong headwind. The run round Southampton to reach the Portsmouth station proved the point. Lots of filtering through rush hour traffic while vainly searching for a petrol station and trying to wedge my tent and sleeping bag behind me as they tried to escape from my badly tightened strapping. After what seemed an age, we pulled up to the Portsmouth RNLI station, well Portacabin really.

From there the next few stations had us looping up and down round large inlets and making very little progress eastwards, but after Littlehampton we soon started putting on the miles in the right direction. At Brighton we were unable to get the bikes near the RNLI station and didn't fancy leaving them amongst the crowds while we trekked around, so we skipped on to Newhaven.

The next real fun was as we fought the ever stronger winds onto Dungeness. As we took our pictures, we realised there was a TVR having a photoshoot on the road next to the RNLI station. The wind was plenty strong enough to make any girl goosey, so I am sure they got some good shots.

At this point the route I had chosen disintegrated from a tarmaced road, into a gravelled one then into a wide dirt track, a narrower dirt track and then a very rutted narrow dirt track as it followed the East side of Dungeness uppast Lydd on Sea.

We plodded on through the building traffic and eventually reached Margate in the early evening, only to find the YHA which I had booked a night was full. After a quick appraisal of any potential B&B's (junkies doss houses IMO) we rode exhaustedly on to Canterbury where the YHA had a spare tent in it garden. Bliss after roughly 300 miles and 13 1/2 hours in the saddle.