I like work

I can watch people doing it for hours.
Which is a good thing as we had to watch quite a lot of people working very hard for a long time on Sunday.
I spent quite a long time playing with google earth on friday night and produced a lot of detailed and interesting directions for getting from here to there and onwards to somewhere else and then a little further to another somewhere and finally the last bit (with enlargements) from London to Brighton.
Sadly, as I extolled the virtues of Google earth to Barney on the first leg of our journeyings, the wind snatched the whole lot out of my careless hand and flung them across the motorway with gay abandon. A couple of pages clung hopefully to the bike hitched up on the back of the car but they blew off halfway round the M25.
Still, we managed to get to everywhere we'd planned (Jude and I had a couple of detours after dropping Adam and Barney on Sunday morning but nothing too stressful).
We had a fantastic Thai meal on Saturday night (The George and Dragon in Norbiton) with a friend who put us up for the night. We were only half an hour late on Sunday morning, for the start of the ride and Jude and I only had to sit through about an hour and a half of traffic jams when we arrived in Brighton. (my personal record for the last 3 miles into Brighton is three and a half hours).
After careful navigating round the back streets, we parked successfully and had coffee and wanderings round The Lanes, surprisingly good fish and chips on Brighton Pier and were in good time to watch Adam arriving triumphantly and sweatily at the finish. At this point, I was leaning over the barrier trying to see past the next spectator's long blonde hair to get a finishing photo of Adam. He saw me, and waved and yelled but I failed to see him. (It's really hard to pick out one cyclist flashing past among a hundred others while squinting into the sun with your head on one side). Jude, 3 or 4 people further along the barrier was yelling at him and he missed her. I didn't get a picture of either of them! Adam got his arm stamped to prove he'd completed the ride (He'd lost his bit of card provided for this purpose)
Barney meanwhile was keeping company with the slowest and least fit (and therefore most praiseworthy) member of our group and they arrived two hours later. (The rest of the nominal Pot Kiln Flyers team waited for no woman and had arrived ages earlier in dribs and drabs. This was a shame as the first two or three years, the PK team all came in together with a good crowd of supporters yelling for them.)
We all felt we'd done a good day's work and Adam and Jude went back to London by train to colllect their car while Barney and I drove home under a westering sun past wonderful places like Arundel and Portsmouth harbour. It's a shame I was driving as there would have been some lovely pics to be taken.
While Barney and adam hitched bikes up on the carand put shoes on and stuff like that,
I took a picture of our friend's wonderful garden in the early morning light.


One traffic jam picture of Preston Park.
While wandering in the town, We saw this rather odd-looking arrangement which appeared to involve a man playing a fiddle halfway up a lamp post
But which turned out, from a different angle to be a man playing a fiddle on a tightrope. Pretty impressive I thought. And not a bad fiddle player!

There were crowds on the beach looking like a postcard
Seagulls (one of which tried to steal Jude's noodles)

And distant boats and splendid lamposts

All day the cyclists came (further back in the town they had to wait for traffic so they came in waves)

and finally Barney and Alex arrived and thanks to a higher position I managed to get a picture.
And next week we are going to Scotland. I hope Scotland will stay still long enough for me to take some decent pictures...I'm tired of peering at distant, hurtling figures which turn out not to be the ones I was looking for. But it was fun having Jude's company and I'm so impressed with our blokes!