Date: 17/06/2022 Crooklands to Kirkpatrick Fleming

Nick's uncle John joined us this morning at the campsite to ride with us for the first 25 miles. This would be the hardest part of todays 80 miles.
Another hot start to the day and the climbs seemed to start almost straight away as we took the cycleroute on minor roads through Natland to Kendal then the A685. This was a relatively quiet road as it wound it's way up and down between the fells, seven days of cycling were taking their toll as I was finding these climbs sapping, and starting up again after our hourly breaks was tough.
The A685 crosses the M6 but we took a minor road just before this and had our second break here.
The final climb in this 27 mile section was up Orton Scar and this is where Nick's uncle John would leave us to go back to Crooklands to pick up his car.
Now it was more or less downhill on the minor road across the moor to Crosby Ravensworth, through King's Meaburn, were we had our lunch break with Rodney at 12:30.
It was a welcome hours refueling stop. It had been sunny all the way and we'd had a good breeze behind us to help me up the climbs but the clouds had built up and were darkening during the break.
About 5 mins after restarting the ride we felt our first rain of the trip and had to phone Rodney to catch us up so we could get our waterproof gear on.

We continued on through Cliburn, picking up cycleroute 71 over the A66 into Penrith when we followed cycleroute 7 out of the town to cross the M6 again then continued on the minor roads through Newton Rigg, Laithes, Skelton to Dalston where we followed the River Caldew into Carlisle.

The rain wasn't heavy or directly in our face so it wasn't too bad, but we hadn't finished with the climbing so it was heads down & keep pedaling.
The final 16 miles were generally down hill and Nick did the trip's second puncture repair after Carlisle, when his rear sealed tyre started to lose air and he put a tube in.
We stayed on cycleroute 7 and crossed the border into Gretna then took the B7076 for another 4 miles to get to the campsite at Kirkpatrick Fleming where we were able to get warmed up under a hot shower.

81 miles with 4200 ft of climbing in 6 hrs 34 mins, avg speed 12.3 mph.